Vision is a word that can, with equal ease, generate hours of discussion in C-suites and academic departments. Executives worry about finding it. Academics labor to define it. Consultants claim to have it. Yet to date, finding a clear definition of the term that can be used consistently in empirical research has been an elusive goal. For some researchers, vision is being “able to see the future.” For others, it is understanding what products and services future markets will value. For yet another group, vision is about perceiving currents of change that lie beneath the surface of markets and even society. Vision is so elusive a concept to define that in business writing its meaning is often either taken as self-evident or redefined for the author’s purposes. 

Perhaps because of the definitional challenges noted above, conclusions about what kinds of leaders and companies are “more visionary” also have mixed results. Some researchers believe that the most visionary ideas emerge from big companies with large teams and the financial resources needed to run large research and development (R&D) efforts. Others believe that small companies unbeholden to legacy-thinking are best able to innovate new products and services. 

Given the complex history of this term, it is refreshing to see recent research from Paul Vicinanza (Stanford), Amir Goldberg (Stanford), and Sameer B. Srivastava (Berkeley), who present not just a novel conceptualization of what vision is but also put it to an innovative test of validity. 

This team breaks from the typical research trajectory on this topic in two fundamental ways. First, they define vision not as technical innovation per se. Rather, vision “inheres in the difficult-to-observe ideas that originate within groups and that fundamentally restructure how a field will operate in the future.” In other words, vision is the ability to “rethink the contextual assumptions that predominate a given field.” By contextual assumptions, they mean the beliefs that are central to the work a company does and therefore guide its choices.  

Put simply, a company is visionary when it challenges the way the world works in the present, and its new ideas become the way the world works in the future. This outcome can occur for several reasons, from seeing sudden environmental shifts that others do not to simply being better at convincing customers and even competitors to follow their lead. 

With this novel definition in mind, the authors make their second break from past research. While other studies typically focus on the tangible outputs of innovation—e.g., patents and products—they chose to focus on one important intangible input of innovation: language.