Different perspectives

The vacuum cleaner that doesn’t need emptying; the petri dish with bacteria that turned out to be the birth of penicillin; the emergence of Renaissance, Impressionist and almost every other art movement.

Whenever we look at a challenge we make a vast number of implicit assumptions. By looking at a problem from a different perspective we can remove many of these invisible boundaries and so sometimes find ingenious solutions to what had previously seemed like insoluble problems.

Ask yourself, for example, how would Britney Spears solve global warming or George W. Bush sell a new brand of crisps? The immediate answers may not be enlightening but they are certainly likely to be different from your standard suggestions.

As Albert Szent-Gyorgi (Nobel Prize winner) noted, “Discovery consists in seeing what everyone else has seen and thinking what no-one else has thought”.