How I Structure Thinking to Stay Ahead of Markets That Don't Exist Yet

By Liviu Irinescu

In 1996 I opened one of the first internet cafés in Romania. In 1998 I was spending millions on pay-per-click advertising before Google Ads existed. In 2017 I co-founded an international music festival. In 2026 I'm building an AI-integrated fractional CMO practice. The thread connecting all of them isn't luck or instinct - it's a deliberate approach to how I structure thinking and what I look for before markets become obvious.

Structured time for deep thinking

Innovative thinking doesn't happen in meetings or during execution. It happens in the gap between consuming information and producing a response to it and most operators close that gap entirely by filling every hour with activity.

I protect two specific blocks weekly that are non-negotiable: one for what I call market scanning (reading adjacent industries, emerging platforms, and early-adopter communities with no agenda other than pattern recognition) and one for what I call constraint thinking, where I ask: if I had to solve this problem with half the budget and twice the speed, what would I do differently? Constraint thinking produces more innovative solutions than open-ended brainstorming because constraints eliminate the obvious options first and force genuine creativity on what remains.

The rule I apply to both blocks: no output required. The moment deep thinking time has a deliverable attached, it becomes planning time, which is a different and less generative cognitive mode.

Mindset for disruptive ideas

The mindset that enables disruptive thinking isn't confidence or creativity, it's comfort with asymmetric information. Every significant opportunity I've identified early shared the same characteristic: the upside was genuinely hard to articulate because the market didn't exist yet, while the downside was concrete and visible.

Most people wait for the upside to become articulable before they act. By the time you can clearly explain why an opportunity is good, the opportunity is usually gone or crowded. 

The mindset shift that enables early action is learning to evaluate the quality of the asymmetry rather than the certainty of the outcome. A bounded downside against an open-ended upside in a market showing early structural signals is the pattern worth acting on before consensus forms around it.

The practical habit: I keep a running log of things that feel too early or too strange to take seriously. Every six months I review it. The ideas that have moved from strange to obvious in that window are the ones that deserved earlier action.

Fostering consistent creative output in teams

Managing 40 departments across three editions of an international music festival taught me that consistent creative output at scale requires one thing above all others: psychological safety to propose ideas that might be wrong without career consequences.

The structural change that produced the most creative output from our teams: replacing idea evaluation meetings with idea separation meetings. In a standard meeting, proposal and critique happen simultaneously, which kills creative risk-taking because people self-censor before speaking. In a separation meeting, the first 20 minutes are pure generation - no evaluation allowed. The second 20 minutes are pure critique. The separation removes the social risk from proposing something imperfect, which is the only condition under which genuinely novel ideas surface.

Creative output isn't a talent problem. It's a psychological safety problem dressed as a talent problem. Fix the environment and the ideas follow.

Connect With Liviu

Website: www.multiplycmo.com

LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/multiplycmo