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There's no one way to foster big ideas and innovative design

July 28, 2015 - We hear how crowd sourcing solutions may be the way of the future and look at why truly outside-the-box ideas are such a hard sell. We also probe the idea of creative genius.
Kristin Nelson · CBC ·
(Penguin Random House Canada/Hayeshayes.com )

What's the best way to foster brilliant, creative design?

The Ebola outbreak of 2014 was the largest in history. The easily transmitted virus crippled several countries in West Africa. And before it began to wane... an estimated 27-thousand people were infected and more than 11- thousand died.

Frontline workers made valiant efforts to contain the virus, but their efforts weren't always entirely effective.
And so at the height of the epidemic a design challenge was launched at Columbia University. The plan was to crowdsource new ideas for the treatment and containment of Ebola. Non-experts were enlisted to brainstorm solutions to everything from decontaminating medical instruments to quarantining victims. 

  • Ridish Patnik is a third-year year biomedical engineering student at Columbia University who designed another solution.

This redesigned suit is one of the winners of a competition through Columbia University to find solutions for helping stop the Ebola outbreak.
  • Dwayne Spradlin says these kinds of design competitions are increasingly necessary to find the breakthrough ideas. He is the author of Open Innovation Marketplace and a veteran of crowdsourcing solutions to problems from different disciplines. Currently, Dwayne Spradlin is the CEO of Health Data Consortium.

  Corporations and governments may love the IDEA of innovation, but transformational ideas and their creators are often stymied. And most inventors struggle to find investors willing to take a gamble on their creations.

  • Michael Helander is the co-founder of OTI Lumionics. For seven years he tried to get his design for a new lighting system off the drawing board and manufactured. 

A Harvard University study found that innovators of all kinds need to climb a steep hill to sell new ideas. 

  •  Karim Lakhani is one of the co-authors of that study. He's a business professor at Harvard.

Where do great ideas come from?

  • Kevin Ashton is the co-founder of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Auto-ID Lab and the author of How to Fly a Horse: The Secret History of Creation, Invention and Discovery. He argues that the idea of creative genius is a myth, and says that great flashes of inspiration are never the work of just one person... even if one person does get all the credit.

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