Where Good Ideas Come From

Interesting book on the generation of ideas.

Here's Steven Johnson's book video.

Homo sapiens goes Euro

So what about those "very first" good ideas?

Well, for one thing, Homo sapiens knew how to make changes in order to survive. Survival is always a good generator of ideas that work. And it seems this new Euro species had it in spades. How and when that ability first arose really doesn’t matter. Let’s say, it just did. However, when a threat did arise, either real or perceived, Homo sapiens changed either themselves or their environment or both until the threat was there no longer.

And since they lived a rough, precarious existence, any change small or large affected them profoundly. They didn't have words like creativity or innovation to attach to the changes that they made, but the changes amounted to much the same thing. Sometimes such change was ill considered or ill conceived, and they paid dearly for the mistake. That they survived says something about the percentage of winning changes that they made. And over their 140,000-year sojourn in Africa, Homo sapiens must have encountered the need to make such changes more than once. Over time, the ability to do so got hard-wired into their brains.

Hard-wired for Change

So why all the yak about change and creativity? It’s because we’re all creative by definition; it’s a natural part of our species. There’s no demarcation line between an artist’s creativity and an engineer’s innovation; rather, we are all creative and innovative at one and the same time. If fact, early Homo sapiens performed more creative construction projects than elegant wall paintings, so engineers are probably closer to the originating font of creativity than artists.

The hard wiring exists in all of us. After that, it’s a pinch of genetics and DNA here, a dash of culture, community, tradition, and language there, good nutrition, acceptable health, and a little Latin and less Greek to round out the brain so that a mind can comfortably exist.

The all-important aspect comes with the threats, those challenges real or imagined, to the organism. What will the mind do? Instinctively, it’ll opt for change and be creative. It’s at the intersection of threat, mind and brain that an ignition point is reached and bursts into the flame of an idea. Then the performance begins. Unless we live our lives under a bell jar, threats are very real, everywhere and continual. And the performance inevitable.

The difference between artists, writers, and their equally creative engineering and scientific brethren is that one lot performs its brand of creativity mostly as a single individual in isolation, while the other lot does it in pairs or in groups. In fact, Homo sapiens originally created not as a loner but rather in a group.

So, how does one foster creativity in the technical mind? Try threats—even time can be a good threat. So what degree of threat elicits the creative response? That’s the rub.

Creativity and the Technical Mind

If we are all wired for creativity, does the technical mind work any differently?

Not according to W. B. Stouffer et al in their paper, “Making The Strange Familiar: Creativity and the Future of Engineering Education”.

"The creative thought,” they contend, “is something that leads to the creative act or the creation of something new—an idea, theory, or physical product. When approaching technical matters, the term “innovation” is often used instead of creativity to describe the process that leads to insight or progress in a field, with a technique, or with a physical product. While innovation connotes a sense of inventing a thing as opposed to an idea or a theory, it is essentially a synonym for the creative process. Perhaps technical people prefer to be “innovative” rather than “creative.” Regardless of what you call it, both innovation and creativity should lead one to the same end: to the exciting world of inventing and creating new knowledge, processes, and artifacts that push forward our science, technology, and art."

They go on to say that, "The creative process must go through a series of four stages, beginning with 1) a notion or need (sensing, problem definition, and orientation); 2) an investigation of that notion or need (testing, preparation, incubation, analysis, and ideation); 3) an articulation of a new idea or solution (modifying, illumination, and synthesis); and 4) a validation process of that idea or solution resulting in an idea, theory, process, or physical product (communicating, verification, and evaluation)."

In his article “How Creative Engineers Think,” Tom Peters explores the creative problem solving of leading engineers such as Gustave Eiffel. Based on archival data, Peters determined that many groundbreaking design con-cepts stem from simple, often sublime reformulations of current thinking and practice, and that these creative breakthroughs are often fed by study and observation outside of engineering paradigms.

"He uses historical examples including Brunel's bridges, the Crystal Palace, the Palm House at Kew Gardens, and the Thames tunnel to illustrate what he calls "technological thinking", a combination of the linear, objective scientific method and the subjective matrix method. In every case, the project required new thinking and new technology to succeed."