"We have one and only one ambition. To be the best. What else is there?”- Lee Iacocca

Big ideas motivate. They inspire allegiance. They simplify decisions. They connect head and heart. Here are some examples: Microsoft’s computer on every desk, The Body Shop’s green idealism, Pret a Manger’s ‘we made it here’ authenticity or Google’s mission to organise the world’s information (and run ads against it). A company’s big idea determines the products it chooses to make, the way it deals with its staff and how it presents itself to the rest of the world.

One reason for having a ‘big idea’ is that it helps companies surf the waves of change in our society rather than be swamped by them. The only constant in today’s business world is change. Competitors develop new products and invent new business models. What was comfortable and familiar last year is utterly new this year. Executives feel the pressure to get out ahead of the competition. A big idea helps them do that.

As consumers and citizens, we feel the slipstream of this relentless change. For example, by March 2006, 18.3 million UK homes were using digital TV services, 11 million homes and small businesses had broadband connections, and there were around five million 3G subscribers according to OfCom figures. These are all inventions of the last 12 years. Blogging and social networking seems to have sprung up virtually overnight. In the UK, there are now 3m MySpace users and 2.5m Bebo Users. Moore’s law, which has seen computer power double every 18-24 months, has held good for 40 years and it predicts that it might continue to hold for another 10 to 20 years until the laws of physics intervene.

Another reason for having a big idea is that it makes it easier to explain to employees where your ambition will take you. It’s a shorthand way of communicating your strategy and how to achieve it. Mere incrementalism isn’t enough. Michael Porter, the Harvard Business School professor, says that too many companies have abandoned strategy – a big idea with a plan for implementing it – in favour of growth, product improvement or cost reduction. (See "Michael Porter's Big Idea" in Fast Company.) These are not strategies; they are best practices, required in any business. The irony, he says, is that when we look at companies that are truly successful it is immediately apparent that they have clear strategies. In our terms, they have big ideas. There is a tangible difference between them and their competitors. “Strategy 101 is about choices: You can't be all things to all people,” says Porter. The big idea clearly expresses a company’s strategy.

Although a strong brand and a ‘big idea’ are not the same thing, they are closely related. A strong brand emerges from a big idea. There is compelling evidence that companies that do have a strong brand are much more profitable than their competitors are. A survey of marketing and sales executives in European Top 500 companies by Wolff Olins and management consultancy Booz Allen Hamilton found that that brand-oriented companies are more profitable than their competitors. These companies integrate brand, strategy and organisational structure. They are companies with a big idea.

Like Robert Jones, Wolff Olins brand maven and author of The Big Idea, we believe that ambitious companies haven’t tried to “research a future that doesn’t exist yet, or second-guess the competition, they followed their own instincts, and made their own future.” It is the ambition to create the future rather than predict it that is the central hallmark of ambitious companies.