Creativity comes from combining unrelated things. Solar-powered torches, inflatable dartboards, and concrete life rafts sound absurd until an Australian miner uses the torch underground. The clockwork radio and wheeled suitcase prove that weird pairings solve real problems.
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try weird combinations. And one of the great formulas for being creative and innovative is to try weird combinations. Let me give you a list of some of the recent patent applications in the Dublin Patent Office. There's the solar-powered torch, the inflatable dartboard, the concrete life raft, the underwater hair dryer, and the waterproof tea bag. And I gave a talk a A little while ago, I talked about these inventions, and a man came up to me afterwards. He was Australian. And he said, you know those solar-powered torches you were talking about? And I said, yep. He said, we use those. I said, what? He said, yep, we leave them out in the sunshine, they charge during the day, we take them down the mine at night. And you can have a solar-powered torch. You could have an inflatable dartboard if you used Velcro darts. You could certainly have a concrete life raft if you had enough air pockets in it. And as somebody pointed out to me, a hair dryer in a submarine is an underwater hair dryer. And if you had a tea bag that remained waterproof in the kitchen until about 80 degrees and then let in water, it would stay fresher in the kitchen for longer, wouldn't it? The point about the story is that seemingly stupid combinations are sometimes the most productive. A clockwork radio, what a stupid idea. We all know radios require electricity. But it turns out that it's transformed the lives of millions of people in the Third World because somebody, Trevor Bayliss, had the gumption to challenge that assumption that all radios should be that way. So weird combinations can be very powerful. If you go to the airport now, you see everybody pulling their suitcase like this, wheeling it along. You probably do it yourself. 10 years ago, you didn't see that. People would take out their suitcase, they'd put it in a trolley, and they would push their trolley like this. And then some product manager in some luggage company said to himself or herself, what would happen if we took the wheels off the trolley and we put them on our suitcase? And it's transformed suitcases, made the thing much easier for— Traveling. For customers. What are the wheels you could put on your suitcase? What's the thing you could add to your product or service to make it easier and more convenient?
