Chase, Chance, and Creativity: The Lucky Art of Novelty (The MIT Press)

Exploitation. Keep the emphasis on ideas, theories, and hypotheses that can lead to action. If your creative efforts are ever going to cause change, you can't stop now. You must follow through on the project, investing more of yourself to make sure that change does, in fact, occur.

A moment of creative inspiration is rare. It has both a long incubation period and, if it is to prove fruitful, a lengthy subsequent development. We find that the creative experience in science begins with an unconventional person, of abilities both diverse and contrasting, who is well grounded and receptive in his professional field. He not only p

Verification. If a solution has arisen, it is still only one possible solution. If a hypothesis springs forth, it remains to be tested. Again, hard mental and physical work enters in. You will save much time at this point by shifting into hypercritical gear, deferring all leads save those most pregnant with new possibilities. Ask the "so what&

True creativity is characterized by a succession of acts, each dependent on the one before and suggesting the one after.Edwin Land

Beyond these gifts the adult researcher needs a special permissive attitude, one that enables him to "see" deeply into a problem, then to find relationships between many seemingly unrelateditems, and finally to forge links that connect them. He is not only adept at recognizing a cluster of facts, but he is utterly transfixed when he notes

Our future is still malleable, still very much in our own hands. Nothing is predetermined. Chance can be on our side if we but stir it up with our energies, stay receptive to the glint of opportunity on even a single hair above the underbrush, and continually provoke it by individuality in our attitudes and approach to life.

Discovery is pluralistic. It springs from a dynamic interplay between one's own life style and that of other persons, between intuition and reason, between the conventional scientific method and chance in all its forms. The more diversity there is among these elements the more unique is the resulting creative product.