What results should we expect from a creative investment programme?

Creative investment programmes should be judged by business readiness and innovation capability before they are judged by revenue alone. In a survey of senior B2B decision-makers, respondents from highly imaginative businesses reported stronger confidence in seizing opportunities, greater resilience, better performance against peers and considerable revenue growth. Respondents from organisations with low imagination scores reported the opposite pattern, including shrinking income and lower confidence.

Those findings describe an association, not a promise that investment will cause a particular revenue result. They do show that creative climate, collective creativity and future readiness can be treated as meaningful operating outcomes. A programme should therefore track whether people can surface possibilities, challenge precedent, contribute ideas across functions and pursue new opportunities with greater confidence.

A creative investment programme produces stronger innovation capability when creativity has time, budget, leadership attention and practical routes for collaboration. The operating model identified in the research has four parts: bring people together across the organisation, explore future possibilities and learn quickly, welcome ideas from outside established roles, and dedicate resources to creativity.

Cross-functional collaboration matters because strategists, account teams, writers, designers and operational colleagues can contribute different perspectives to a strategic problem. Historical data and customer insight remain useful for understanding what has happened and what people need, but they do not by themselves create a future option that does not yet exist. Protected space for collective imagination helps teams move from analysis to possible responses, then build the support needed to make an idea real.

We believe a creative investment programme should create an enduring organisational capability, not a one-off workshop or a loose permission to think differently. Our research found a gap between leaders valuing creative opportunities and organisations allocating significant resources to support them. That is why we focus on the conditions that make creative thinking usable: time and space, cross-functional contribution, diverse perspectives and room to explore possibilities before settling on an answer. We have put this into practice by bringing strategists, account managers, writers and designers together when developing major ideas for clients, rather than assigning the task to a single discipline. We also developed The business of imagination research to show how collaboration, experimentation, openness and investment can be embedded in everyday work.