According to this article in the New York Times, children have the ability to come up with ideas that are truly innovative and out of step with those that adults with the same problem can provide. The question becomes: why do we lose creativity as we grow up?
According to the researchers, this decline in creative capacity has its origins in a tension between exploration and exploitation. Exploitation is what adults do when they are subjected to a problem: they search their knowledge base for a solution to the given problem, trying to bring it closer to a known situation. Exploration is a form of letting go that leads to the exploration of new paths. The disadvantage of the latter: it is longer and more “risky” in the sense that it may provide solutions that will never work. However, it is at this price that we can find THE right idea!
Conclusion: have a lot of crazy ideas, to throw away 90% of them and keep the others.
