(FORTUNE Magazine) – As dot-coms disintegrate and global competitors consolidate, innovative executives had better recognize that the art of business increasingly depends upon the business of art. Art and design will assume a strategic importance comparable with that of science and technology. You'll find ambitious firms trolling through art schools and conservatories with an ardor previously reserved for MBAs.

The motivation here is neither truth nor beauty--although either would be nice--but the accelerating need for ideas that differentiate companies. Successful artists--effective artists--make the ordinary shockingly novel or the grotesque oddly comfortable. That's 80% of the corporate innovation challenge right there. What's more, the Duchamps, the Picassos, the Warhols all grasped that marketing is an art form as well. The market is as much a medium for profitable self-expression as is the canvas.

Artists-as-entrepreneurs abound. Philippe Starck's prolific (re)design of objets--from utensils to hotels--and postmodern architect Michael Graves' lucrative design relationship with Target department stores reinforce the stereotype of superstar artists picking patrons to mass-market their highbrow creations. There will always be initiatives to commoditize "brand-name art" by corporations.

But the coming trend is subtler and far more important. In the late 1960s atomic-bomb metallurgist Cyril Stanley Smith wrote a provocative essay arguing that the most significant breakthroughs in materials technology didn't result from entrepreneurial attempts to build better tools but rather from artistic efforts to produce pretty objects, like jewelry. In fact, Smith maintained, the artistic impulse most likely drove technological innovation in materials development millennia before recorded time.

This close coupling of art and technology transcends discipline: The origin of the modern chemical industry is the story of a search for colorful dyes for fashion and fabric design. Scientists quickly discovered that such dyes were also useful in staining cells and killing bacteria. The modern pharmaceuticals industry stems largely from this fashion-driven R&D investment.

Pop culture--from music to television to videogames--is nothing but an ongoing collision of artistic technologists and technology-oriented artists. Indeed, self-declared "artists" now contemplate using the helical fruits of genomics to create life-form mutants--for example, glow-in-the-dark dogs--that they insist on calling "art." Will these "artists" discover unexpected expressive techniques appealing to more functionally inclined geneticists? Only those willfully ignorant of history should bet against it. Superstar artists represent but the tip of this aesthetic iceberg: Organizations, not just individuals, need to cultivate and invest in an aesthetic sensibility if they want to create outstanding innovations.

Much as hotshot biotech firms appoint Nobel-stuffed "scientific advisory boards" to offer cutting-edge counsel, it's inevitable that imaginative enterprises will set up "artistic advisory boards" to suggest aesthetic ways for the firm's techniques and technologies to evolve. Can this be done cost-effectively? Can this be done in a way that complements--rather than undermines--both marketing and R&D? Such questions will consume ever greater amounts of management time.

Of course, integrating artists into the innovation process offers no guarantees. Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center, for example, pioneered a very clever artists-in-residence initiative that has obviously had little impact on the firm's bottom line. Then again, Nokia, Sony, and George Lucas' Industrial Light & Magic special-effects company have done exceedingly well by drawing on designers, animators, and other artistes. It's only a matter of time before professional services firms start hiring acting coaches and improvisational theater directors to generate novel and proprietary interactions with clients.

Will gifted artists allow themselves to be co-opted by global business? Some undoubtedly will, and why not? The idea that an MFA can rival an MBA for innovative insights or that an aesthetic sense can be as important as a flair for numbers may make traditional managers uneasy. However, that's precisely the sort of discomfort upon which art--and innovation--thrives.

MICHAEL SCHRAGE is co-director of the MIT Media Lab's e-markets initiative and author of Serious Play. Reach him at michael_schrage@fortunemail.com.