Creating Great Ideas

Innovators are hunters: They pursue ideas. They listen, observe, and ask questions. They’re never satisfied with things that work “well enough.” They solve problems and make connections.

image:John Howe

“In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.

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J.R.R. Tolkien

An idea is simply a new combination of existing elements. The best way to make new combinations is to develop the ability to discover relationships—to make connections between things that seem totally unrelated.

Tolkien said that the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy, as well as The Hobbit, grew out of the simple sentence quoted above. He wrote it one day when he was doing some mental gymnastics. He was fond of making up words, and “hobbit” is what he came up with that day.

His curiosity was stimulated. “What’s a hobbit?” he asked himself. “And why does it live in a hole in the ground?”

He had the raw materials for a story: a hobbit—whatever that was—and a hole in the ground. How were they connected? This simple question led to Tolkien’s creation of a mythological world and the unforgettable characters that populate it.

Innovators are pursuers. Ted Hoff, who invented the first microprocessor in 1969 for Intel—the chip that made personal computers possible—said, “The issue with invention is to pursue it…Otherwise, the idea is just a flash, and it’s gone.”

If Tolkien hadn’t followed his hobbit down the hole, we would not have the pleasure of knowing Bilbo, Gandalf, and Frodo.

Frederick E. Ives, inventor of the halftone printing process, is hardly as well-known as Tolkien’s characters have become since his stories were made into blockbuster films. But this great inventor helped shape the face of modern communication. His invention of halftone printing is an example of what can happen when people pursue ideas.

Before Ives invented the halftone process, photographs could not be printed in newspapers. Printers had no way to reproduce the fine shades of gray in black and white images.

The halftone process revolutionized printing. Ives discovered that black and white dots could be used to reproduce shades of gray, since the eye “sees” the dots as an uninterrupted image.

After studying the problem one night, Ives went to bed in a state of mental exhaustion. When he opened his eyes the next morning, he saw “apparently projected on the ceiling, the completely worked-out process and equipment in operation.”

How do we make the right connections?

We become hunters. We immerse ourselves in the problem. We search for relationships that start to reveal how the pieces fit. And when it seems that we have reached the limit of our abilities, lightning strikes.