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

Stepping stonesfor creative thinking

There is another metaphor I sometimes use when describing insights. The great Hungarian author and philosopher, Arthur Koestler, whose book The Act of Creation made an important contribution to the study of the creative process, once described words as “stepping stones for thought.” Similarly, I like to think of insights as “stepping stones for creative thinking.” Just as a large, flat stone (or a series of stones) allows us to cross easily from one side of a stream to another, insights allow us to make the necessary leaps of association that lead us to big ideas.

In my own eight-step model of the creative process (shown on pages 214 and 215), you may recall that I clearly separated the insight from the idea, as follows:

Come to an illuminating insight that fundamentally shifts your perspective

Build the insight (or insights) into a big idea—a new combination of thoughts

Let’s go back and briefly review some of the innovation stories we looked at earlier in the book in an effort to not just distinguish between the insight and the idea in each of these cases, but also to understand how the insights became the stepping stones to these big ideas.

Archimedes and the king’ s crown

Insight The amount of water displaced by a submerged object ...