Creativity involves putting together elements that are not usually associated with each other and coming up with a surprising result. The two conditions necessary for being granted a patent are 'novelty' and 'non-obviousness'. The invention needs to be 'new to the world', and it needs to be a bit of a surprise. The other day, I had some leftover spaghetti, but it wasn't enough for a meal. I thought I'd have some bread with it (the idea came from restaurant dining, where bread is often served with a meal), but I didn't have any butter. Then (bing!), I thought, I can put the spaghetti between two slices of bread... that would be just enough food, the bread wouldn't be dry, and it would be neat and easy to eat. I did, and the result was actually quite tasty (sort of like an eggplant or chicken parm sub with pasta instead). Now this invention was new to me (I had never heard of a spaghetti sandwich), but was it new to the world? I typed "spaghetti sandwich" into Google images and got several pictures of spaghetti sandwiches and quickly found out the invention had been thought of previously. It therefore lacked 'novelty', and could never be patented (not that I would... this is just a silly example).
Now a lot of people might go,"Yuck!" at the thought of a spaghetti sandwich, but only because it is unfamiliar and seems strange. When I was a young child, one of my favorite books was "Green Eggs and Ham" by Dr. Seuss. It was all about breaking the paradigm of unfamiliar being bad... at first the Cat in the Hat refused to eat the green eggs and ham, but after lengthy persuasion, agreed to try it... only to find that he actually loved it!
When I was in college at WPI, I minored in 'Creativity and Creative Problem Solving'. As part of my education, I put together a 3 day course on how to be more creative, which was held during winter break. In order to promote the course, I put up flyer around the campus that said (with the words formed into a question mark that covered the page), "Are you strange? Would you like to be stranger?” followed by enough info to know how to sign up for the course. I got 18 students to sign up. If you want to be creative and inventive, you really have to be excited about adventuring into the strange and unknown. You need to look at things from a different and unusual perspective. You need to be comfortable with ambiguity and willing to mix and match things that are at most tangentially related (i.e. at least 2-3 degrees of separation). Often, when I am trying to find a solution to a problem, I will isolate one aspect of the problem, generalize it, and then explore how others have solved the general problem. After finding some interesting solutions, I bring them back to the original problem and see if they unlock a novel solution. Often, they do.
Another common element of creative people is that they will use what is already around them in new ways. Creative people will tend to collect things and educate themselves about all kinds of things so that when that opportunity arises, the needed components and information will be readily at hand.
One important distinction to recognize is that there is an important difference between innovation and creativity. Creativity is fun and play and surprising and humorous and joyful and rewarding... but, more often than not, the outcome is rapidly forgotten. Innovation is where creativity produces something that has social, economic, emotional, or some other form of value, and that value is recognized, and the invention is subsequently duplicated, distributed, and adopted because of its clear value.
Often the innovation will be improved upon as people tailor it for their particular application. This is user innovation on top of existing innovation, and it takes place because (a) people have a specific need that the invention (in its current form) does not fully address, (b) they typically have at hand the tools that can be integrated into the invention, and (c) they have a certain expertise in that field. These user innovations frequently becomes the next generation of the invention. A research study done at MIT found that approximately 3/4 of innovations come from users. Users really understand the need (often better than the manufacturer), and, often by serendipity, will have some skill or talent that enables them to modify the innovation in a way that makes it better for them. It was somewhat shocking to me how often a product would be launched without the marketing person ever using the product themselves. If we are to be really good at innovation, we need to be personally involved to get the richest solutions, and we need to learn new skills and achieve new levels of understanding so that we can apply that to future innovations. Finally, understand the users, and look for unique and interesting applications and modifications to your innovation. That could be your next generation success story!
