Einstein was clearly ahead of his time on many fronts, but even he may not have fully understood the future relevance of this quote to today’s realities: “Imagination is more important than knowledge.”
In an AI-driven world, where knowledge is abundant and instantly accessible, the differentiator shifts to how it is used, how ideas are formed, challenged, and ultimately turned into something real.
At a business level, I’d propose that the activation of imagination shows up as innovation. Innovation is the engine of change, the mechanism through which organizations adapt, differentiate, and compete. Whether the goal is growth, efficiency, resilience, or market leadership, the path almost always runs through the ability to turn ideas into outcomes.
That has always been true. What is changing is the speed - and the expectation. For years, innovation has been constrained, not by a lack of ideas, but by the ability to pursue them. Time, cost, risk, and structure meant only a small subset of ideas could be explored, typically by small “expert” groups tasked with doing so on behalf of the organization. AI is removing much of that constraint. It is compressing the distance between idea and implementation, accelerating experimentation and iteration, and expanding who can participate. What was once limited is becoming abundant.
However, despite how we often describe it, innovation has never really been a solo act. While initial ideas may originate with individuals, they are refined, validated, and scaled through interaction, through the exchange of diverse perspectives, the testing of assumptions, and the realities of execution. If innovation at its core is not an individual capability, then as it becomes more distributed, more continuous, and more central to competitiveness, the quality of the collaboration behind it becomes a defining factor in whether organizations succeed or fail.
And this is why the role of the collaboration industry needs to be reconsidered.
Moving Beyond Tactical
Historically, we have defined our value in terms of enabling communication. We build the rooms, deploy the platforms, and integrate the systems that allow people to connect, and we have done that well. (Indeed, so much so, it has become increasingly tactical and commoditised). But in an environment where innovation is central to performance, and collaboration is central to innovation, that definition is no longer sufficient.
We know that simply bringing people together does not guarantee better thinking. It does not ensure better decisions, faster learning, or more effective outcomes. We see that every day in the variability of meeting quality across organizations. Those outcomes require something more deliberate. Historically, delivering that has been difficult, but AI is now providing the most intelligent, collaborative, and adaptive foundation for change that we have ever had. We are at the dawn of an opportunity to build environments, physical, digital, and increasingly intelligent, that do not just host interaction but can actively contribute to and improve it.
The Dawn of Opportunity
To be clear, AI is expanding what is possible, but it is also exposing a gap. While most organizations have invested heavily in collaboration technology, they are still not equipped to consistently turn an abundance of ideas into outcomes at speed. If organizations need to build innovation as a core, distributed capability, that requires more than technology. It requires the ability to enable effective, repeatable, collaborative innovation across the business.
That is both the challenge and the opportunity in front of the industry. It is the shift from delivering collaborative environments that are passive… to enabling systems that are actively supportive. Systems that can potentially help guide discussions, structure decision-making, surface relevant insight, and help teams move more efficiently from conversation to action. Systems that embed best practices of collaboration and innovation rather than leaving “good” to chance.
While collaboration will always extend beyond innovation, in an era where innovation becomes THE primary driver of value, helping organizations improve how they innovate, how they move from idea to decision to execution, creates impact that is not just incremental, but compounding. The result? Not just efficiency, but meaningful differentiation. Real competitive advantage. And ultimately, sustained economic impact.
And that is where our relevance as an industry should expand. Not because collaboration is new, but because its role is fundamentally changing. If we recognize and act on this opportunity, it shifts the industry’s model, from one defined by transactional delivery and competitive pricing, toward one aligned with accountability for outcomes and participation in value creation.
But to achieve this vision, there is a parallel truth we need to confront. The model through which our industry has historically innovated is not built for this moment. Innovation has largely originated at the vendor level, been delivered as features through the supply chain, and presented to customers as capabilities to adopt. That linear model struggles when the real challenge is not access to tools, but how those tools are applied, integrated, and evolved within complex, real-world environments.
So, if collaboration becomes the infrastructure of innovation, then the way we innovate as an industry must reflect that. It must become more collaborative. And that means moving beyond a model where innovation is created for customers, toward one where it is created with them. Where end user organizations play a more active role in shaping solutions. Where integrators extend beyond deployment into orchestration and continuous refinement. And where vendors enable more open, adaptable platforms that support this shared process.
In other words, the industry must embrace the same collaborative innovation discipline that our customers are now being forced to develop. Because the connection is direct. The more effectively we build this capability within our own ecosystem, the more proficient, credible, and valuable we will become in helping organizations do the same. The opportunity is immense. But it will not be realized through incremental change, or by any one part of the industry acting alone. It will be defined by how effectively we come together to build what comes next.
AI is Compressing the Very Premise of Time
We know there is a natural tendency to overestimate the impact of technological change in the short term and underestimate it in the long term. In our industry, that often leads to inertia, a tendency to wait and see. But in this moment, even that framing feels unstable. The pace of AI is compressing the very premise of time. In the CAPEX-driven cycles we are used to, what once felt like a normal horizon now feels like an eternity. Now is not the time to wait.
While certainly there are many in that camp, I also believe that for many across the industry, the “why” behind the need for transformation ahead is not the real challenge. Amid infinite commentary and rhetoric around AI-driven change, the harder questions, the pressure to act is far more practical. It’s about “where to begin”:
- What actually needs to change, across both technology and human capability, to move beyond the constraints of the past?
- Who will lead the necessary shifts in mindset, in how we define value, and in how we build the operational capabilities required across vendors, integrators, and customer organizations?
- How do we fund and scale new skillsets, new models of experimentation, and new business approaches that move us from project-based delivery, bound to the speed of the physical, toward continuous, outcome-driven services that evolve at the speed of digital?
- And perhaps most critically, when do these shifts move beyond early adopters and begin to scale?
This article is the first of a series intended to explore those questions in practical terms, what the gaps actually are, where capability needs to be built, and how the industry can move from delivering collaboration… to enabling innovation at scale.
Like the organizations we serve, we need structured environments to explore ideas for industry transformation. We need real investment in experimentation. We need more collaborative and diverse partnerships, within and beyond the industry. And so hopefully this series can play some part, be some form of catalyst to that.
Because if innovation is the engine of competitiveness, and collaboration is the engine of innovation, then the conclusion is hard to avoid. We are closer to the center of value creation than ever before. The question is whether we are ready to take the steps to operate there.
