In this article “Collaboration Makes Our Brains Bigger,” Gaurav Bhalla references a TED talk by Dan Gilbert to mention how the human brain has grown significantly in size over the last 200,000 years due to its power of imagination.
Moreover, the development of the kind of imagination was mentioned as well, i.e. that
We moved from imagining, “How big is the universe?” to imagining, “How do we work together to build a spaceship to get to the moon?”
So, collaboration seems to be one of the main reasons we developed imagination. In other words, we became Homo Sapiens because we had a better brain that could imagine how to collaborate, and because we could imagine how to collaborate we became better Homo Sapiens. And the more we learn to collaborate — and that includes the list of things like co-creation, value creation, open innovation, collaborative innovation, collective innovation, and continuous innovation — the more our brains will grow.
Image: "Education" by Sean MacEntee.