The familiar phrase “think outside the box” is an invitation to business unusual. It pops out at times of difficulty, when other ideas feel uninspired or doomed. It appears at training and strategy off-sites. Leaders brandish it to demonstrate unconventionality and openness.

According to one source the expression originated in the United States in the late 1960s/early1970s. Various management consultants claim the phrase but a single-person attribution is hard to find. One early citation comes from July 1975’s Aviation Week & Space Technology, “We must step back and see if the solutions to our problems lie outside the box”.

Implicit in the phrase is a criticism of the box and the person in it. The box is a prison and the person serving time an uninventive plodder. The outside-the- box person is unhindered by orthodoxy or constraints, worthy of admiration. The box, accepting its finite boundaries and terms of engagement, needs repositioning, as does its hapless occupant.

Most sport – football, tennis, basketball, even cricket - is played inside a box. The playing area has lines you cannot cross. Players are controlled by all-powerful officials, who regulate behaviour. This might suggest limited room for innovation. How far from the truth that is! The scope for invention is boundless - without breaking the rules - especially in the hands of precocious talent. The ball at Christiano Ronaldo’s feet, the racket in Roger Federer’s hands, Steph Curry on the 3-point line and Virat Kohli, bat in hand, produce moments of magic that make a mockery of limits. Apart from gifted individuals, there is huge scope for creativity in team strategy, as successful managers like Zinedine Zidane, Steve Kerr and Ravi Shastri demonstrate. Looking at brands: Reliance Jio brought creativity to telecom, Red Bull to beverages and Maruti Suzuki to small cars with Brezza.

When a solution has been optimized it needs efficient and faithful reproduction. Ensuring a reliable repeatable outcome is worthy and admirable. Often a well-understood problem needs new ideas to solve it better. A great example of this is found in mathematician Professor Marcus du Sautoy’s 2015 documentary on algorithms: the challenge of handling large amounts of data at high speeds was better solved than the existing Bubble Sort method by John von Neumann’s Merge Sort algorithm.

Before going outside, stretching the box’s boundaries could prove attractive. One way to “expand the box” is to widen the frame of reference of brand consumption. The 50- and 20-overs formats of cricket are examples. In India Brand IPL lays claim to cricket’s expansion with its kitsch desi-ization of the American sports marketing model. Another example of expansion is Amazon Pay, through which an independent retail brand can avail of Amazon’s payment system.

Finally, there’s the delicious headiness of thinking outside the box. The guard rails are temporarily removed and the team can Blue Sky with abandon (until the evaluation criteria kick-in and many ideas bite the dust). When there’s no more room inside or around the box, this is the way to go. Flipkart will need to, to spend its reported $4bn kitty well, with fundamental thinking around questions like Theodore Levitt’s famous, “What business are you in?”.

This will likely redefine their box. No matter where you are with respect to the box – inside, outside or around it – an inspired new angle and a brilliant team make all the difference.