The Dream Cafe: Lessons in the Art of Radical Innovation

SSYNERGY

The Oxford English Dictionary defines synergy as: ‘The interaction or cooperation of two or more organisations, substances, or other agents to produce a combined effect greater than the sum of their separate effects.’

The American engineer, inventor and full time innovator R Buckminster Fuller, who coined the term ‘synergetics’, refined the term in the following way:

A dynamic state in which combined action is favoured over the difference of individual component actions.

Behaviour of whole systems unpredicted by the behaviour of their parts taken separately, known as emergent behaviour.

The cooperative action of two or more stimuli (or drugs), ­resulting in a different or greater response than that of the individual stimuli.

Fuller understood that the myth of the lone artist, or inventor, limited the potential to discover that co-collaboration offers a more productive strategy for ensuring that the questions you define, answer and eventually develop are more likely to be relevant if they emerge from a dialectical process. Fuller's acknowledgement that stimulants can help suggests that he was aware of the avant-garde tradition of lubricating, or otherwise stimulating and encouraging, participants to share their imaginations.

The gaps in any brand strategy are the locations for lost energy and opportunity. At The Dream Café we focus on creating opportunities for synergetic ...