Biography
Meenal Banga is an instructor at the Seidman College of Business at Grand Valley State University. She is passionate about teaching and is fascinated by the human mind’s ability to imagine. Her research explores counterfactual imagination within the emerging Space economy.
Organizations today increasingly operate in environments marked by high uncertainty—driven by rapid technological change, unforeseen market shifts, institutional volatility, and expanding time horizons of economic activity. In such settings, traditional predictive approaches to strategy, which rely on historical precedent, reliable data, and stable causal mechanisms, often fall short. As a result, firms are compelled to turn to imaginative strategies that construct and articulate futures not anchored in present realities. Meenal’s research examines how firms and entrepreneurs can harness what we know from cognitive science about the cognitive architecture of imagination to develop such strategies and use them to shape the future to their advantage. The broader aim of her work is to reconceptualize imagination as structured and teachable, moving beyond its usual treatment as free-associative or whimsical and advancing an understanding of it as something that can be acquired as a skill, taught in classrooms, and strategically mobilized in practice.
When she isn’t teaching or researching about imagined futures, Meenal is usually busy exploring the present. A spiritual seeker at heart, she is curious about the nature and meaning of reality, life, and the universe. She loves being out in nature, spending time with her two wonderful pups, and pondering life’s big (and sometimes wonderfully unanswerable) questions.
