How to make more of your ideas:
Invention / Innovation
In this section we have looked at how to apply your imagination to be creative, to come up with new ideas. In this section we explore how to apply your creativity to become inventive and innovative.
Got a good idea? How do you know how good it could be? Is it going to change the world?
Emily Cummins had a good idea; she realised that when water evaporates, the temperature drops, and if you can keep that process going for longer the lower the temperature will be. Emily's solar powered evaporation fridge can keep medicines vital for health in hot climates for longer.
In order for Emily's good idea to be truly inventive and innovative, she had to work at lots of different versions, called prototypes, to come up with the best performance.
The fridge works by having a layer between two cylinders where the water evaporates. She had to try different metals for the casing, and different stuffings for the layer that holds the water. In the end she found that sheeps wool made a good layer.
But was that the end of the story for Emily's fridge? No, it was just the beginning. She then decided that the fridge needed testing in the places where she wanted it to be used – these are sometimes called field trials. So Emily raised the money to travel to southern Africa where she met many people in remote villages in South Africa and Namibia. Then she explained how the fridge worked, and got lots of people to try it out. This was important because if no-one in the villages thought it was a good idea, or decided not to use it, the power of Emily's creativity would end there; it would not be truly innovative.
Emily has been back to Africa with another version of the fridge, and other ideas for improving the lives of people living in difficult circumstances.
So, to sum up – to translate creativity into invention and innovation takes time and effort; it takes insight and perseverance. You need to prototype your idea, and then look at how to make it work. You need to test it and improve it.
And then you need to persuade other people how good an idea you had in the first place – but selling the idea is another story.