Hard work, meaning hard thinking, causes more associations and variations to occur than does relaxation. The thinking may take the form of compulsive brooding. Active reading of technical literature and observation of the physical world around you may provide elements without passage through memory.
Thinking about the problem during boredom time-shopping with spouse, attending dull concerts, driving, exercising, etc. -helps the process. Energetic people do more hours of hard thinking than do sluggish people.
Stubbornness and Perseverance
Stubbornness and perseverance contribute to success in innovation, both in the mental struggle to generate the ideas to solve a problem and in physical experimentation. Edison was a paragon of persistent hard work. The story of his developing the high-resistance lamp filament by experiment after experiment until he was successful needs no repetition here. He is quoted as saying, "Genius is 1 percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration."
Some people have what the psychologists call an "obsessive-compulsive personality." They brood on a problem over and over again, and if they also have talent, they produce results which a more lighthearted person with equal talent will not produce.
Some minds think better in concrete terms: wheels and volts and shapes and pH and geometry. Some minds think better in abstract terms: entropy and energy, and legality, and pure mathematics. Some minds think better in details, others in systems. Invention occurs in all these regimes, but the more the mind can encompass both concrete and abstract thinking and both detail and system thinking, the more and better innovations that can be produced.
There are passive personalities, who only respond to direction from others, and aggressive personalities, the self-starters, who act on their own initiative. The aggressive ones are both blessings and curses to their managers, but they are the ones who invent.
Many famous inventors have been aggressive both in their conceptual work-the actual inventing-and in the promoting of their inventions into use and commercial success. Edison, Ford, Firestone, McCormick, Tesla, and Marconi are a few of the names in this category.
Motivation
What motivates people to invent? Perhaps there is some spiritual force of sheer creativity. Perhaps. But there is no perhaps about the forces of egotism, greed, security, and loyalty.
Every inventive person many have ever heard of, in any field, is an egotist, whether an outspoken boaster like Picasso or a shy introvert like Van Gogh. Bringing forth inventions establishes and maintains self-esteem and the respect of others. Patents and awards and publicity are prestige merit badges. Whether or not an inventor has a deep-seated insecurity which requires this form of reassurance many leave to the inventor's psychoanalyst, but the egotism is universal. "Greed" is a dirty word, but many will stick to it.
Thinking about the problem during boredom time-shopping with spouse, attending dull concerts, driving, exercising, etc.-helps the process. Energetic people do more hours of hard thinking than do sluggish people.
Brainstorming
Brainstorming is a more organized and gentlemanly form of argument. At first the members of the group invent with as little inhibition as they dare and with no criticism permitted aloud. Then the ideas are subjected to criticism to find a survivor. Thus the efforts of a group may surpass those of a single individual. A variation, which many have found most productive, is competitive leapfrogging, in which each member tries to improve on the last idea of another member. The final leap would not be made without the preceding leaps. Much of the present work is such brainstorming for clients. (Ideally, the client's engineers make the last leap so that they will carry the ball with enthusiasm.)
Certain argument practices are helpful, and certain other practices are harmful. You should try very hard to keep your temper when arguing. Your arguments will be more rational, and you will be more persuasive.
A valuable by-product of argument, whether passionate or polite, is joint invention. Incidentally, if you examine most of the arguments you have had and heard, particularly about human affairs, you will find that most of the arguments on both sides are qualitatively true. The real problem is to establish which truths are quantitatively of greater importance or value than the others; that is very hard. So we just throw the qualitative truths at each other, and no joint conclusion is reached.
Analogs
A formal and disciplined technique of invention is the application of analogs. Analogs are different phenomena subject to the same mathematical equations. Examples of analogs are:
- Electric fields-magnetic fields
- Electric voltage and current-magnetomotive force (mmf) and flux
- Inertia-inductance
- Stiffness-capacitance (actually 1/capacitance)
- Resistance-viscous drag
- Force-voltage
- Fluid flow-current
- Energy in any form-energy in any other form
- Heat flow-fluid flow-electric current
- Temperature-pressure-voltage
- Waves in water, air, solids-transmission lines-radio
Analogy is used in inventing by observing a device or phenomenon, remembering a relevant analog, and conceiving an analogous device. In some cases an invention results without a problem to start it.
Systematic Arraying
There are formal techniques of problem solving which aid the mind in qualitative design. (If they reach the final result by themselves, well and good. There is no law which says that an invention must be better than a result of formal engineering.) Tabulating, on paper, all the elements recalled by free association may help. Researching the literature for more information about those elements you judge to be promising will certainly help. You can design matrices in which different combinations are arrayed, and you can assign numbers representing your value judgments.
Using Computers
Some people are trying to do this sort of thing by computer, starting with large databases. They usually deny that they are trying to mechanize "invention" and say that they are only trying to mechanize "design." Their buzzwords are "theory of design."
