Create the Improbable — Art Thinking at Maison Lumière

A four-round corporate-innovation simulation set inside Maison Lumière S.A., a 134-year-old French cookware house in Lyon (EUR 410M revenue, 9% EBIT) whose flagship Cocotte Classique has fallen 6% a year for four years. The board has just killed the studio's safe 'Cocotte 2027' line extension and given the 22-person innovation studio EUR 180,000 and 21 days to pitch a genuinely improbable, category-creating idea — or be shut. Playing the intrapreneur team, you apply Sylvain Bureau's Art Thinking ('creating the improbable with certainty') and Schumpeterian creative destruction across four moves: (1) Reframe the brief instead of polishing the answer — refusing 'a better Dutch oven'; (2) Choose and run a disruptive provocation that generates improbable rather than merely novel concepts, while protecting them from next-quarter feasibility filters; (3) Decide what to destroy — naming the SKU, process, margin or heritage product to cannibalise, and honestly booking the EUR 8–12M year-one displacement while turning 'improbable' into a deliverable prototype with proof points; and (4) Pitch the reframe→provocation→destruction→prototype arc to a heritage-protecting board chair and an external investor, securing buy-in for the EUR 3.2M studio budget. The math rewards the disciplined Art Thinking arc — reframing before ideation, suspending feasibility during divergence, naming destruction openly, pairing audacity with credibility, and winning an internal sponsor before the room — and punishes the five classic errors: polishing instead of reframing, novel-but-safe ideas that destroy nothing, killing the improbable too early, hiding the cannibalisation, and vision without delivery. Final KPIs track Improbability, Certainty, Sponsor Buy-in and the remaining pitch budget in EUR.