Innovation Management: Embracing the Fantastic to Get the Military Moving in New Directions

This paper challenges traditional military thinking by advocating for a paradigm shift. The paper argues that militaries must abandon Newtonian incremental, pragmatic approaches that are based in the known war paradigms and instead embrace innovation through creative destruction and the fantastic. The fantastic, representing infinite human abstraction, is identified as the catalyst for true innovation. The paper highlights the necessity of abductive reasoning over deductive and inductive logics, particularly in complex, emergent systems and proposes refining ideation through experimentation, allowing for the exploration of novel ideas while navigating institutional frameworks. Ultimately, it argues for the need for a multi-paradigmatic perspective, embracing complexity, and recognising the inevitability of failure in the non-linear process of military innovation.