Are you ready for a revolutionary prediction? Good, because I have one for you. On Saturday, Marshall visited West Virginia University for the Coal Bowl gridiron contest. Imagine it for a few moments.

Naturally, we think of the exciting plays on the field, the roars emanating from the crowded bleachers and the partisan colors -- green and white on the one side, gold and blue on the other. It is also very natural and normal to imagine the winner of the contest, as well as its loser. Quite often, however, I challenge myself to think in abnormal, nontraditional ways. So as I envisioned the Marshall-WVU football game through a creative lens, I arrived at the following prediction: The winner will be both.

I promise to expound on my wild prediction, but for now, imagine two societies. Society A is a hunter-gatherer society, foraging through a shrinking environment for food and animal-skin clothing. Society A is made up of many individual tribes all struggling for the same limited number of animals and plants. The scarcity of available land for hunting is a constant source of friction that leads to violent conflict with neighboring tribes.

Society B developed into an agricultural society. While there is still a limit to the amount of land available for farming, they found over the years that collaborating with neighboring tribes to cultivate the land leads to an abundance of food. In fact, the abundance has led some citizens to learn new skills and provide new services, such as building tents and tools. Society B even trades with similar societies to gain new items, such as spices and furs from exotic animals.

This, of course, is a snapshot of early human history. It is the transition from scarcity to abundance, from conflict to collaboration. And while we have certainly not eradicated scarcity and conflict from our world, we have centuries of evidence that shows how an emphasis on collaboration leads to innovation, which leads to abundance. The transition from hunting and gathering to agriculture, after all, is one of mankind's most strategic innovations for survival.

Scarcity mentality leads to an ever-increasing division among people. We divide ourselves into smaller and smaller groups to hold on to "what's ours." Abundance mentality leads to the blurring of differences and a bias toward finding commonalities. It is a pathway toward innovation.

Most dictionaries define innovation as "the introduction of something new." But Wikipedia, that innovation in how knowledge is defined, states: "Invention that gets out in to the world is innovation. In economics, the change must increase value, customer value or producer value. The goal of innovation is positive change, to make someone or something better. Innovation leading to increased productivity is the fundamental source of increasing wealth in an economy."

BusinessWeek recently ran a compelling article on the "innovation economy." While we wallow in anxiety over the state of the world economy, BusinessWeek notes that a focus on innovation has been the key source of economic growth over history. Think of the economic wealth generated during periods of incredible innovation in areas such as agriculture, industrial production, transportation, healthcare, computer technology and the Internet.

According to the BusinessWeek article, the latest figures show that "multifactor productivity" -- a category that includes technological change and other improvements in business processes -- accounted for 45 percent of productivity gains between 1987 and 2007.

Karim Lakhani, a professor at Harvard Business School, states: "Innovation is not just exerting effort and spending money; it's problem-solving."

As West Virginia University and Marshall University begin to invest their $50 million "Bucks for Brains" budgets allocated during the last legislative session to stimulate research in our state, it is important that two things occur. First, that the research generated by this taxpayer-funded investment is indeed problem-solving in nature, preferably on problems whose solutions would be in high demand by the rest of the world, such as energy and health care. This logically will lead, assuming few hindrances are put in place and private equity investment is embraced, to the commercialization of this research and the formation of new startup businesses. This is the formula of the great innovation centers in America -- Silicon Valley, Research Triangle Park in North Carolina and the federally funded research communities in northern Virginia and Maryland.

Second, we must embrace an abundance mentality. In the past, our small state has often behaved more like Society A than Society B. University vs. university, county vs. county and even small town vs. small town within a county have tended to compete for limited opportunities. When the availability of decent-paying jobs is typically at the discretion of a nameless, faceless executive in some other state, it can generate a sense of anxiety and competitiveness. If your town got the new manufacturing plant and mine didn't, I lose.

What if our state embraced Society B's abundance mentality and began to collaborate on a building a new "economic garden"? What if we blurred the lines of our differences and collaborated toward an innovative future?

As a native of this great state, I've certainly seen my share of actions rooted in scarcity mentality. But since returning to West Virginia and working with many communities across the state through the Create West Virginia initiative, I am encouraged. At every presentation and workshop we deliver, we are meeting people who are ready to collaborate and innovate.

The transition from scarcity to abundance mentality is a core topic of the Create West Virginia 2008 conference Oct. 20-22 at Snowshoe Mountain Resort. We invite you to hear a leading voice in exploring issues of diversity and abundance mentality and its relation to innovation. Mary-Frances Winters is president of The Winters Group, an organizational development and diversity training group that helps corporations and communities make the transition from scarcity to abundance.

It will take a while. We are still living with remnants from a long history of scarcity mentality. But the more successes we can generate and promote, the faster the walls of fear and mistrust will fall. And very soon West Virginia will be a valued source of innovation that leads to abundance, not just for our own state but also for the world.

What about that opening prediction -- two winners of the Coal Bowl? In fact, this is the truth of the matter. Sure, one team had more points than the other when game concluded. Yet both universities benefited from the publicity. They shared revenues. Plus, there are important, intangible benefits resulting from the cooperation and collaboration between the respective staffs that plan and prepare for the event.

While there may have been only one winner of the football contest, indeed both schools won in the larger sense. This simple exercise illustrates the power of imagination and the abundance mentality. Such new ways of thought can be powerful and require only creative thinking and foresight. If you are ready to learn how to lead your community toward more creative ways of thinking, please come to the Create West Virginia Conference. I am already envisioning you there.

Jeff James is CEO and founder of Mythology, a marketing consulting firm in Charleston. He is also the chairperson of Vision Shared's Creative Communities team. Learn more at www.createwv.com.