blue-sky thinking

blue-sky thinking

Thinking that is not limited to commonly accepted norms or beliefs. Everyone said Einstein was a fool when he was growing up, but his blue-sky thinking led to some of the greatest scientific advances of his time.
See also: thinking
Farlex Dictionary of Idioms.

blue-sky thinking

Blue-sky thinking is when people try to find completely new ideas. In an admirable piece of blue-sky thinking, the party has begun attracting supporters from the world of fiction. This meeting will help us do a little blue-sky thinking.
See also: thinking
Collins COBUILD Idioms Dictionary, 3rd ed.
See also:
  • thinking
  • put (one's) thinking cap on
  • put thinking cap on
  • put your thinking cap on
  • keep (one's) mind on (something)
  • keep mind on
  • keep your mind on something
  • put on (one's) thinking cap
  • put on one's thinking cap
  • put on your thinking cap
References in periodicals archive
Blue-sky thinking - airline Blue Air invited passengers to choose where their next destination from Liverpool should be
PowerPoint presentations might have become pretty much synonymous with plodding university lectures and seminars peddling nonsense about 'blue-sky thinking', but this is the exception that proves the rule.
If this is what amounts to blue-sky thinking from the US domestic carriers, they are misguided, misinformed and mismanaged -- a combination which results in second-class service for every passenger who uses their services.
This is the sort of blue-sky thinking we want from Labour.
As a solution, the much-publicised home zone concept aims to eliminate the conflict between road users which our control systems nurture, but again where is the blue-sky thinking promised by our highway designers?
After some blue-sky thinking, brain dumping and thinking outside the box, author Richard Havers managed to get his ducks in a row and used a text-oriented approach to convey his message.
A product of the creative studio Qurios - founded in Hartlepool by husband and wife team Neil and Diane Bushnell - and Newcastle's Dean Films, NE31 stars in a ten-minute digital fusion of comedy and blue-sky thinking designed to excite even the driest industrialist to speculate on what the year 2109 may hold.
"It's bad enough when people at work talk about 'blue-sky thinking' and 'singing from the same hymn sheet', but now we're starting to use these clichE[umlaut]d phrases at home," the Telegraph quoted Zory Radnay-Florian, a spokesman for Ramada Encore hotels, which commissioned the survey of 2,035 adults, as saying.
However, others believe that when it comes to future development plans we should have blue-sky thinking.
The present vocabulary of the City Slacker includes terms such as footprint (sales area), low-hanging fruit (easily achieved), quick win, out of the box (unexpected ideas), blue-sky thinking (ideas unrestricted by convention) and pushing out the envelope (going as far as possible).
Warwick Conferences, the training and conference centre at Warwick University in Coventry, indulged in some blue-sky thinking and decided to hold the meeting up on a roof during National Meetings Week.
The blue-sky thinking in the report points towards a future where daily on-site attendance at school will have been replaced by on-line studying elsewhere.
Blue-sky thinking: I get there are situations in business where you need to look at something with fresh eyes and no preconceptions, but couldn't we use "original" or "creative" thinking to describe these instances?
They have to do something, so blue-sky thinking, or thinking outside the box, keeps them entertained.
"This is blue-sky thinking; I think everything on this list is 'do-able'; I don't think it would break any international law or breach any treaties.