Eleven Greatest Ideas for Useful Originality
Idea 79: Quantity or quality?
To create is always to do something new.
Martin Luther King, US civil rights activist
New ideas are essential for industry, commerce and the public sector alike. Innovative products and different ways of doing things are the lifeblood of successful enterprise.
We all have new ideas. We vary, however, in terms of the quantity we produce in our lifetime, and still more in the quality of those ideas. People who have many new ideas with a high rate of excellent ones among them are the ones we tend to call creative thinkers.
Case Study: Dr R. Buckminster Fuller
An example of an A-type thinker is Dr R. Buckminster Fuller, an inventor, engineer, architect-designer and philosopher. After being expelled from Harvard and failing as a businessman, he turned to architecture and invention.
One of the most controversial architectural figures of our time, he produced designs for unprecedented types of structure that reflected his belief and optimism in the benefits of modern technology. Thus his Dymaxion House of 1927 saw the modern home not in terms of a walled structure but as technology servicing the human life within it. The house hung from a mast on a wire construction. The Dymaxion three-wheeled car of 1932 similarly rejected the traditional coach maker’s craft to produce a futuristic design.
However, none of Fuller’s inventions caught on before he conceived the Geodesic Dome, a linking of triangles into a strong and lightweight sphere. It was another result of his relentless pursuit of architectural forms along the path of mathematical logic. Architects hailed it as a genuine advance and Fuller’s public image as a lovable crackpot began to change. Unlike classic domes, his did not depend on heavy vaults or flying buttresses for support. The weight load was transmitted throughout the structure, producing a high strength-to-weight ratio. More than 3,000,000 domes have since been built.
The word ‘creative’ should be bestowed rarely. It always implies a value judgement. A good idea is one that a critical mass of people deem to be both useful and original.
Therefore we should separate in our minds the two dimensions of creativity: quantity and quality. There are prolific novelists in most countries but we can all probably think of a writer who produced only a few works of real genius.
Creativity is a holistic combination of mental abilities and qualities of personality, temperament and character. At the heart of that combination, however, is synthesizing: the ability to combine miscellaneous things into new wholes.