Abstract Efforts to promote creativity and imagination often centre on encouraging people to engage in ‘design thinking’, ‘systems thinking’ or ‘entrepreneurial thinking’. These different forms of ‘thinking’ have been described as the keys to innovation across a broad range of application areas, including policy making, strategy formulation and healthcare. Design-, systems- and entrepreneurial thinking are most often defined, taught and applied in mutual isolation, which has obscured what they have in common, how they are distinct and how they might be combined. They are also most often described in isolation from the ‘ways of thinking’ that characterise other disciplines, all of which are relevant to the recognition of opportunities and the development of solutions: ‘computational thinking’, ‘mathematical thinking’, ‘scientific thinking’, ‘engineering thinking’, ‘geographical thinking’, ‘anthropological thinking’ and many more. Collecting and examining descriptions of these different ways of thinking permits the connections and contrasts between them to be identified and for each of them to be better understood in relation to the others. Such comparisons make it easier to identify, select, apply and combine different disciplines’ ways of thinking to promote creativity and imagination in individuals, groups and organisations.