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| How to think
for great ideas |
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partner, Paul Allen, had a dream to put a computer on every desk and in
every home.
The two richest men in Europe5
owe their wealth to their father, Richard Rausing. While watching his wife prepare
homemade sausages, he became intrigued by how she peeled back the skins to insert the
ingredients. That idea turned into the system of pouring milk from cartons, and his heirs
still receive royalties every day from millions of Tetrapak milk cartons.
All the great ideas in history, all the great
inventions, obviously have one thing in common. All have come from the human brain. Just
as the brain has fantastic ability to store information, it has an equal ability to
reassemble that information in new ways: to create new ideas.
And very simply, an idea is a new combination of
old elements. Write that down, underline it, reinforce it. It could be the most
important sentence you ever write. It contains the key to creating new solutions. There
are no new elements. There are only new combinations.6
Think for a moment of the thousands of different
cookbooks around the world. Every recipe in every book is a different mixture of existing
ingredients. Think of that example whenever you tackle a problem.
And all the breakthroughs everywhere - radio,
television, the internal combustion engine - are new combinations of old bits. A
push-button shower combines at least three "old" elements: hot and cold water
and a mixing valve. Nylon and other "new" synthetic fibres are new combinations
of molecules that have existed for hundreds of centuries. In nylon's case: recombined
molecules from coal.
Since an idea is a new mixture of old elements, the
best ideas-creators are constantly preoccupied with new combinations.
In most management courses, you learn the overriding
need to define correctly the problem you want solved. But now a new revolutionary
element has emerged. We can now define the ideal solution in advance - and start creating
it.
This is a revolutionary change. Whereas previously we
organized our existing knowledge to solve a problem, within the limits of that knowledge,
today we start by defining what we would like to achieve. And then we organize the things
we don't know in order to achieve it.
Sixty years ago clothing manufacturers were stuck with
such basic yarns as wool, cotton and silk. Then Wallace Corothers synthesized
Contents Page Preface
Introduction
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