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412 : APPLYING CREATIVITY TO THE IDEA DEVELOPMENT PROCESS

Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft, provides a further illustration of this
powerful combination of left- and right-brain thinking. In 1974, a like-
minded friend, Paul Allen, spotted an article in Popular Electronics
about the world’s first home computer, the Altair 8800. Primitive by
today’s standards, the Altair lacked software which would allow it to
achieve something. Gates not only perceived the opportunity, he sensed
that he and Allen were capable of writing a software program for the
Altair. On the strength of this right-brain intuition and before writing a
single word of code, Gates called the president of Altair’s manufacturer
with the claim that they had created a version of the popular computer
language BASIC for the Altair. Gaining a positive response from the
president, Gates and Allen proceeded to create a program which
worked perfectly and swiftly led to the foundation of Microsoft.33

artist as businessman – a contradiction in
terms? To demonstrate that whole-brain thinking was a long-

standing phenomenon just waiting to be discovered, consider the
example of leading 18th-century English portrait painter Thomas
Gainsborough.

Gainsborough combined exquisite artistic right-brain skill with a finely
developed left-brain financial instinct. Having prudently married into
money, he moved from the relative wilds of Ipswich to the splendour of
Bath, which was rapidly becoming a fashionable winter resort for
wealthy Londoners, in order to pursue what he described in his private
letters as ‘the curs’d Face Business’. He would often paint only the face
and sometimes the hands of his subjects, leaving his lesser qualified
staff to paint the backgrounds, while charging a price as if the entire
creation was his alone.

creativity and the idea development process

Creativity lies at the heart of the idea development process because
each of the four steps of the process represents a cycle of
divergent–convergent thinking, as shown in Figure 2.3.

Each divergent thinking phase generates ideas imaginatively, seeking
quantity of ideas, the more intuitive and innovative the better.
Judgement and evaluation are suspended. Each convergent thinking
phase seeks to refine and improve the options and to select the
elements to pass on to the next step.