'''Idea Conception In Business'''

Somebody in our society has to be conceiving ideas. Who?

''Me :)''
''Oh wait. Do you mean good ideas?''

It seems like programmers don't get to create ideas because their work is based on being given tasks.
Managers and business people don't get to create ideas because they have to do what their customers want instead. -- JonGrover

Even artists don't get to create ideas because their work is considered the final product and does not get to a phase where their ideas are implemented or used by other people.

''This seems to discount all of the ideas that people do create on the basis that they are "too obvious". If you do that, the creation of ideas becomes something mysterious and precious. OTOH, if you don't, it becomes an everyday reality.''

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'''Idea Use In Society'''

I guess I'm just complaining that I have lots of ideas and that I don't seem to have a forum for them in any business I have been part of, and I see this happen to other people too. -- JonGrover

Perhaps if one thinks of ideas as resources or building blocks, or as residing in a tool box, when the time comes for implementation of the idea, it can be applied in the process/project. An idea is usually an unfulfilled and unrealized concept begging for application. If it finds one, it becomes an invention, is exercised through the application. Humans had an idea of flight long before that idea ever developed. The idea finally took shape and developed through practical implementation by BicycleMechanics.

I remember reading Kary Mullis' recounting of his invention of the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) upon which much of modern biological inquiry is founded. It came to him while driving up to his mountain cabin. He had to stop his car and rummage through his glove box looking for paper and pen to check some calculations. He couldn't stop thinking about it. He cut his weekend short to check the libraries: it must have been thought of before ... but it hadn't. The following Monday he shows it to some colleagues. They say, well yes it would work, but so what? They convinced him it was nothing. So he put it aside and got back to work. He put it aside for months, until some laboratory robotics got him thinking about it again. The idea worked, but the robotics made it work well. 

Kary is a bit of a kook too. I loved his book anyway: ''Dancing Naked in the Mind Field'' ISBN: 0679774009.

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CategoryCreativity CategoryIdeaForm