The Four Lenses of Innovation: A Power Tool for Creative Thinking

UnderstandingNeeds

The fourth pattern of thinking that was characteristic of Renaissance innovators was their seemingly insatiable curiosity for the world around them, and their unshakeable belief that they could make the world an increasingly better place.

Fundamental to humanist philosophy was the idea of progress—the notion that human beings have the power and the responsibility to continuously improve the quality of their lives through technology and science, individual liberty, and social modernization. Unlike the introspective philosophers of ancient Greece, who held that the way to understand the world was to look inside ourselves, or the priests of the medieval church, for whom questions and curiosity were synonymous with heresy, the Renaissance mind sought to understand everything—humanity, nature, and the universe—by intensely observing, investigating, and studying it. The scientific method, which gradually crystallized in those centuries, was a way to not only acquire new knowledge, as well as correct erroneous previous knowledge, but to apply that new knowledge to solving unaddressed problems and unmet needs.

No figure from the period epitomizes this more than Leonardo ...