Rules of Creativity
by Shane on 29/03/06 at 11:28 am
3 comments
Seth has some really helpful thoughts on creativity.
Inventing something cool that can’t be implemented isn’t creative. It’s mostly a waste.
Read the entire post here
Shane Dryden is the 'Maven' at Ideate. The driving-force of Yuppiechef, Shane loves to write on advertising and innovation. He spots the non-obvious stuff behind the obvious, which seems obvious, but isn’t really that obvious (obviously). View more articles by Shane.
steve
Mar 30th, 2006
i read his post, and i know that this is a bit out of context but to answer the quote,
there are roughly 2 paths to invention, need and stumble.
need is where things are invented as an answer to a problem – like masking tape, some guy from 3m spraypainting needed a better way to mask over parts of car bodies that needed spraypainting…
then there’s stumble: some guys experimenting with Tetraflouroethylene gas stored their gas in a cold room for the night, in the morning when they opened the valve no gas came out, same for all the containers, they wieghed them and they still weighed the same as the did the night before. they cut open the bottle and found a strange white power very resitant to corrosives and slippery when compacted. turned out they found PTFE or teflon.
The point is at that stage there were no requirements for teflon and according to seth this would have been a waste of time. but they worked at finding ways to impliment their new material, eventually someone decided to stick it on frying pans, and we get the famous “non-stick” frying pan.
sometimes things can’t be implimented when they are first discovered, and the creativity comes in figuring out how they can be used to improve on what is already used out there.
i would like to edit seths quote to read “Inventing something cool that can’t be implemented yet is all right, but figuring out how to impliment it is where creativity becomes useful. Art It’s mostly a waste. thats why someone once said “art for arts sake”. Also when you’re riding in a time machine way far into the future, don’t stick your elbow out the window, or it’ll turn into a fossil
maybe i should have left seth’s quote alone
Susan
Jan 24th, 2007
Is ‘inventing’ nothing else than a function in some large company/corporation where they pay people to think up a lot of possible ideas to try and stay ahead in their market. I agree with steve’s ideas about stumbling onto something new or inventing something out of need. My question is, how do you market/sell such an invention or super idea as an individual to a company?
Fred
Jan 24th, 2007
Susan, I reckon if you want to sell anything, whether it’s a great invention or a simple widget, you go about it the same as any sales process. Check out this post: http://www.ideate.co.za/archives/306