Creative licence: how to stimulate innovation and generate new ideas

Most people would agree that creativity plays an important role in a successful scientific career. But what exactly do we mean by creativity? And how can scientists become more innovative? Physicist, consultant and author Dennis Sherwood has made it his life’s work to delve into the creative process, and help others tap into their own creativity. He runs Silver Bullet Machine – a consultancy that helps companies solve problems, generate and implement new ideas, and grasp new opportunities. Sherwood is also the author of Creativity for Scientists and Engineers: a Practical Guide (published by IOP Publishing, which also produces Physics World), which includes a number of strategies to increase scientific creativity. The work was named best “Specialist Business Book” at the 2023 Business Book Awards.

How do you define creativity in science and how does one go about developing it? We know it when we see it, but it’s a struggle to define it

The question, “What is creativity?” has kept philosophers busy for centuries. In many ways it is a difficult question, but to me creativity is just having an idea. It’s as simple as that. An idea, of course, is something imaginary. It happens within one’s own head. It’s a vision of a future that doesn’t exist yet. So whenever you do have an idea, you are being creative. And, of course, that’s enormously valuable and pervades everything that a scientist does.

Ideas are often easy to come by, but it can be harder to make them work. Do you separate out the “Eureka” moment from what’s involved in getting something to happen?

Yes, there’s a real distinction between creativity, which is having the idea in the first place, and innovation, which is shaping that idea into something real. So I might have a fantastic idea for a better mousetrap or a light bulb. I’ll get excited about that and I’ll drive my wife mad talking about it. But until I can build that better mousetrap or make the light bulb work, it’s just an idea in my head. So creativity is step one in a four-step process. The second step is evaluation. Does that idea have any kind of legs? Is it worth spending time, emotional energy, money and other resources to take things further? Stage three is development – solving all of the problems to make it work. The fourth step is implementation – for example, getting a paper published, a piece of music played at a concert, or a product brought to market.

Creativity is embedded in each of those steps. And one of the great examples, of course, is the light bulb itself. I think the first observation that the passage of electricity causes a light effect goes way back to the 1700s. In 1802 Humphry Davy was the first person to create the incandescent light bulb by using a platinum wire connected to a powerful battery. But it wasn’t until many years later that Thomas Edison patented his working light bulb in 1880. So in those nearly 80 years scientists were busy addressing all of the problems that arose from the fundamental idea, and much creativity was needed, for example to design a vacuum pump so that you could extract the air from the envelope of the bulb, so the filament wouldn’t burn up.

In your book, you look at some specific examples of creativity in physics. Could you tell us about those?

Physicists can benefit from creativity all over the place. If you are a researcher, you need to come up with the “big idea” for your research project, get a grant or persuade a company to finance it. You’re then into the actual work itself, where you will need to solve all the different problems that crop up. If you are building a team, then you need to be inventive in ensuring everyone works well together. If you are a physics teacher, creativity is enormously valuable in thinking of more exciting ways to put complex concepts across to students.

And creativity is also something you need on a personal level too. For example, when I attend conferences I’m usually happy by myself. Although one of the reasons for going to a conference is to network and to meet people, for many years I was too shy to go up to someone and introduce myself – I just couldn’t do it. So I needed to have the idea in my head that it was something I should try at the very least. When I recognized that, and started talking to people at conferences, I found that most were pretty civil and spoke to me nicely. All those fears that I had of rejection went away.

Of course creativity plays a vital role in physics itself, right from the days of Archimedes, who famously had to determine the volume of an irregular object in the form of a gold crown that perhaps had some silver substituted in it. While Archimedes understood the concept of density, and could measure the crown’s total weight, the problem was figuring out how to measure the volume of that abstract object. Inspiration is said to have struck him in the bath, when he noticed the displacement of the water as he got in, and the original Eureka moment was born.

Another great example comes from the creativity displayed by Johannes Kepler, as he looked at Tycho Brahe‘s data and attempted to determine the orbits of planets. To do this, he had to throw all his preconceptions away, for his original intent was to prove that the orbits were circles. When he he realised that the data wouldn’t fit, rather than saying “the data are wrong”, he changed his mind, so discovering that the orbits are elliptical. That scientific discovery was hugely creative. But to me, changing his mind, despite deeply-held beliefs, is even more creative.

Is it possible to have ideas deliberately, now?

Yes. Sometimes, of course, you get lucky, and you can rejoice when it happens. But you can’t rely on that when you’ve got to get that research proposal in, or write your PhD thesis. That’s when you need to know how to make creativity deliberate, and something that you can tap into at will. There’s a widespread belief that it is more about intuition or that “light bulb” moment. You might choose to go for a walk by a river bank, because that worked for Albert Einstein, and you may have a flash of inspiration, or you may not. But there is a way to make idea generation deliberate and systematic.

Over the years I’ve read many books about creativity and I was particularly fascinated by the Hungarian author Arthur Koestler. His 1964 book The Act of Creation is a fascinating study on the processes of discovery, invention, imagination and creativity across the arts and sciences. Koestler felt that the “act of creation” is not that of the Old Testament God – it does not create something out of nothing. Rather, it synthesizes, recombines and shuffles together already existing facts, faculties, skills and knowledge to form a new pattern.

The main goal is knowing how to make creativity deliberate, and something that you can tap into at will.

I found that to be a really powerful statement, and it highlighted that in most cases creativity isn’t a Eureka moment out of the blue. It may look like that at the end, but what is actually happening is you take already existing fragments of knowledge and mix them together in different ways – a bit like playing with Lego bricks – you can put them together in all sorts of different ways.

Indeed, every physicist takes things that already exist and recombines them into new patterns. And when some new knowledge comes along, you can bring that into the mix too and go further. When doing this, you may sometimes have to deconstruct an existing pattern to reveal new truths. So the more knowledge you have (or have access to), the more likely you are to be creative and ready to re-shape that knowledge – perhaps throwing some things away, perhaps exploring different patterns.

Isaac Newton famously said that he stood on “the shoulders of giants”, which is acknowledging the component parts that he brought together. Deconstructing what we know and seeking new patterns is absolutely key.

What are some of the barriers to creativity that scientists face, and do you have any tips for overcoming them?

Whether it’s in academia or industry, the initial barrier is not understanding the fundamentals of the creative process in the first place. If you haven’t come across what I call “Koestler’s Law” – that statement about recombining existing elements – then you may not know how to go about it.

Very often, creativity requires you to deconstruct existing knowledge first. So another big barrier is when someone is unwilling to do that themselves or to allow someone else to challenge their knowledge – especially if they are senior. The history of science is full of people who came up with novel concepts that were in opposition to the established wisdom at the time.

If you are running a team or a lab, and want creativity to flourish, focus on building an environment with the right conditions for that to happen. There are a couple of chapters in my book that specifically look at how to address this issue in the particular context of academic communities.

What are some of the factors that influence the creative process, and what can research institutions do to boost novel ideas?

There are all sorts of pressures on people that influence their creativity, such as the way in which academics have to apply for grants and get funding. If a postdoc is attempting to get a position at a faculty and knows that the main metric they will be judged on is a large body of published papers, then that will be the main motivation. To achieve that, the postdoc is, understandably, likely not to want to take too many risks. But since creativity is necessarily uncertain, that increases the pressure to play safe, and this will inevitably limit creativity.

Those pressures within academia – from getting grants to getting promoted – often squeeze creativity out. In fact, about a decade or so ago the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), which provides government funding in the UK, felt that researchers were playing it too safe in their grant applications, and formed a committee to address the issue. One recommendation was that the EPSRC should create a grant where people like me could work with academic teams on a programme now called “Creativity@home”. Its main aim is to “generate and nurture creative thinking that might lead to potentially transformative research”. My consultancy is a preferred supplier and over the last 10 years I’ve done lots of great assignments. This was a deliberate attempt by the EPSRC to encourage scientists to be a bit bolder and more creative.

The more knowledge you have, the more creative you can be. And that is why the creativity of teams is much more effective than that of an individual. There is a greater shared repertoire, which opens the door for more new thoughts and ideas.

From computers to the Internet, and with the recent growth of AI systems, we all have new tools at our disposal. Do you think that technology is making people more creative, or is creativity a conserved quantity in humanity?

All the things you mention should enrich creativity because there is more raw material to be creative with. Certainly some aspects of creativity are being taken over by AI – there are, for example, already many programs that can create music. But it’s all very well to use AI to discover a credible new pattern of notes of music, or words in an essay, or component parts for a new product. The richest creativity, however, comes from having the power to change my mind, and no AI agent is ever going to replace that. That will always be a purely human endeavour.