Albert Einstein famously said :

“Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.”

I think he’s right, but we should understand that imagination, for all practical purposes, must spring from a foundation of knowledge.  A doctor is a better doctor if he’s imaginative and can transcend his knowledge.  The same is true of any task: we need a foundation of knowledge and then we must apply imagination or we can not go forward.  Knowledge is always the past but imagination is the future.