Or what do bees and the Large Hadron Collider have in common

Written by Andreea Vrabie, a fiery  friend of practical-creative ideas

Creativity is the sort of concept embraced by everybody, but if you were to gather 100 people in a space and ask them to talk about it, you’d seldom get two people talking about the same thing. As familiar as it might seem this concept, which nowadays has turned into a buzzword, it can be difficult to define. What do we mean by creativity? No more than one percent of enliven inspiration? Or, rather the execution of the rest of 99 percent seen as a creative process? Moreover, any confinement would only limit the industries we classify as creative.

This is why I’d rather talk about ideas and innovation, trying to answer the question ”Where do we get our fresh ideas from?”. Whatever the creative activity or industry, innovation has helped society move forward. Whether we talk about Ford’s contribution to industrial revolution, or Apple’s impact on existing technologies, each positive change has been the outcome of a visionary mind. People famous for their innovative spirit set themselves apart from everybody else not only with their strong passion for what they’re doing, but also with their power to observe.

All the time we refer to those 10 000 hours of experience necessary for an individual to be proficient in a certain field, but experience alone will never be enough to start innovating. After the industrial revolution and specialization of labor took place, people stopped paying attention to activities belonging to other work fields, and borders between domains turned cast-iron. Children started taking specialized classes, their teachers losing sight of a interdisciplinary approach mandatory to develop thinking. There is a theory that describes best the way fields influence each other naturally: ”cross-pollination of ideas”. In other words, Facebook wouldn’t have been this successful if Mark Zuckerberg wouldn’t have understood (rather intuitively, by noticing all the parties to which he was never invited) our anthropological need to socialize. This understanding helped him convert human tribes into source code as naturally as possible.

However, most times links between fields are less obvious. Jonathan Gutenberg grew up in a winemaking region of Germany and was probably familiar with wine presses used to extract the juice from grapes. So he decided to use the same method for each type, and this way the printing press with movable types made history by spreading knowledge all over the world. Benzene’s chemical formula has been a puzzle for a long time, chemists failing to understand how’s possible to link six carbon and six hydrogen atoms in a linear sequence. Kekule came up with the ring shape of the benzene molecule after having a reverie of a snake seizing its own tail (this is a common symbol in many ancient cultures known as the Ouroboros), and his theory shed a whole different light on organic chemistry.

And to end on a scientific note, the way subatomic particles violently collide to give birth to a completely different panoply of elements, known as ”quarks”, the same way ideas must be allowed the freedom to generate their own energy. The more we try to see how our expertise in one field might influence the knowledge in some other, the more innovative our ideas will be. After all, who says that the upcoming advertising catchphrase won’t be based on quantum theory rather than on bleak data…