I care a lot about innovation and creative thinking. It’s one of the things that inspired me to learn how to write software when I was just 11 years old: if you can imagine it and it can be turned into a process a computer can run, you can create it. The potential has always been amazing, but now with tools like Ruby on Rails, the idea-to-product lead time is shorter than ever before.

The problem is, most people are awful at creative thinking and forming new ideas. In the UK we seem to be particularly bad at this, maybe because we tend to be more self-concious than many other cultures about looking foolish, or being mocked. However, it’s preventing so many businesses here from flourishing that it drives me crazy. Here’s my take on it, and how I go about coming up with hundreds of new ideas a week (note: coming up with hundreds of ideas is a good thing, acting on them is something completely different).

When traditional business consultants talk about innovation they use phrases like “blue sky thinking” or they may encourage thinking “outside of the box”. It is often thought that if we are constrained by how things are done now, the best way to be creative and innovative is to throw away everything and start from thin air.

It sounds good, and it has a catchy ring to it, but it’s flawed. It’s no surprise that the only original thought these consultants had was to become a business consultant and take your money off you for repeating clichés. They are effectively selling snake-oil, and that’s hardly an original idea.

Innovation does not come from the kind of freedom that means starting with nothing. It comes from changing the boundaries of what you already have, to evolve rather than throw everything away. Throwing everything away might be the idea you come up with at the end of the process, but it’s not how you should start.

A writer’s worst nightmare is often the blank page. A blank page represents the consultant’s “blue sky” - you can put anything on a blank page. This can cause your brain to ‘freeze’ if you don’t already know what is going to happen next. Writer’s block is caused by being able to do anything, not by being unable to do anything.

You need something to work with - you need to give yourself a boundary. One exercise to remove writer’s block is to write one word - any word, just a word - in the middle of the page. Then think about another word that would go with it, contradict it, oppose it, complement it, whatever. Soon, you find your brain giving you ideas, and off you go. This is giving your brain a set of boundaries, something to work with.

Comedy writers know this better than anybody. They have to, because writing good comedy is harder than any other type of writing (trust me, I’ve tried). Take sitcoms: the ‘sit’ is obviously short for ‘situation’ and if you watch a sitcom closely you’ll often find the really funny bits come from a set of situations rather than some cheesy lines. However, there is more to it than that.

Every sitcom starts with a context. In fact, all good comedy is often about the limits of something - a coffee shop, a relationship, a bunch of weird friends, the lead’s self-doubt. Think about all your favourite shows, and you’ll realise that the first thing the writers will have done is define the situation and boundaries the comedy will be written within.

Friends: group of 20-somethings who are close friends dealing with life in modern day New York.

Yes, Minister: the battle between the politician with a desire to do something worthwhile, and the civil service who desire nothing at all to happen if possible.

The Office: the excruciating banality and confinement of working with somebody who doesn’t understand reality.

If I asked you to write a sicom from scratch, you’d find it hard unless you had already defined a set of boundaries like those above. Get the idea? Still don’t believe me? OK, try this:

Write a new joke right now. Come up with something original, a joke the World has never heard before. It can be about anything.

I bet after a few minutes you’re finding it hard. Where do you start?

OK, I’ll help you. The joke has to involve a monk and an elephant. Easier? Probably. If you’re still struggling, I’ll give you a push and suggest you must use a play on the word ‘habit’ as in an item of monk’s clothing and being an established custom. Got a joke yet? Your brain is probably finding it easier now to come up with something funny.

This is what comedy writers do - they find some boundaries, and twist around inside them. It’s not just comedy either.

So how does this relate to technology and software? Well, firstly, it explains why all commercially successful technical advancement comes ultimately from evolution of ideas rather than revolutions.

People often resist revolutions - they need to find a way of relating to something via an evolutionary step. Early-adopters are not always grabbing hold of the next revolution: it’s because they’re always adopting early, that the stuff they do now is an evolution of where they were 6 months ago. We’ll all catch them up in a couple of years when our evolutionary path catches up, but to us it might look like a revolution, but that’s just because we’re being slow.

The evolutionary path we follow in our uptake of ideas is merely us accepting the twisting of the boundaries we’re comfortable with. Some people for example, will have produced a joke about the monk and the elephant that others will have found obscure, obscene or just outright unfunny. But that’s because the way you shape your box and then push the edges is different to how other people shape their box and push the edges. This is the core of all technical advancement, selling new technologies, and ultimately, creative commercially successful innovation.

People talk about the industrial “revolution”, but really it was an evolution of ideas on how to make spinning cotton more productive, mixed with the idea that a steam engine was more efficient than a horse (and didn’t need as much care and handling), mixed again with the idea that selling goods all over the World from a factory in the North of England made more money than selling it all down the local market. Evolution, after evolution, after evolution. It took decades, a lot of pain and failure along the way, and was all driven by people who liked twisting the rules inside a set of boundaries.

It took special circumstances, and a group of people to take a series of steps that others found uncomfortable.

The other reason this relates to technology, is that if we know that innovation is evolution, not revolution, and we know that giving ourselves boundaries to push is the way to be creative, we can use that to produce something valuable. Remember at the start when I said there was no other field more open to new ideas being created than computing? Once you formulate how to be creative, it opens up the playing field completely - you can become a money machine.

Want to come up with a new super-cool Web 2.0 website? Fine, let’s see - it needs to be based on communities, it needs to feel like a desktop app, and ideally it should get better the more people use it. That’s a good start, but I bet you’re still struggling to come up with dozens of ideas. Problem is, they’re all technical boundaries, and what we want is a business boundary - we want to generate new businesses, not new technologies, so we need to focus on the right box.

That said, trying to build a business with no thought to what is possible with the technology is a dumb move, and sometimes taking an old business idea and updating it with the latest tech (cf. Shopify) can produce a great business. However, for this example let’s add another arbitrary business bounday: it needs to be based on an e-Commerce model - people should use the site to buy things.

Right now, your brain might be starting to kick into gear and you’re coming up with ideas. Chances are, if you’re still concentrating on the technical boundaries they’re just re-hashing what has been done before - adding Ajax to OScommerce clones or something - and that’s no good: we want to get a bunch of really original ideas.

First thing we could do is say we’ll do the exact opposite of what everybody else does. So let’s do a web-site that when you visit it, it’s full of people wanting to buy things, and you can sell them what they need - the 180 degree turn-around. That’s an interesting and innovative twist.

We could just as easily brainstorm how to make something bigger, smaller, easier, harder, cooler, less cool, more popular, more niche, more intelligent, less intelligent, and so on. Look at every feature of eBay or Shopify and ask yourself “How would I do that differently?”

If we built a site where instead of a list of products, it was a list of wanted ads, we could then look at it again from fresh and find an evolutionary step from there. It may be that what we actually do is aggregate specially-tagged content from people’s blogs and allow marketers to find what bloggers are after, rather than hosting the ads ourselves. We may decide to produce a version that is highly targets to a very small niche. We might want to make it something well suited to market researchers trying to produce the Big Toy This Christmas.

Then, once we have those new boundaries, we start to twist within them and we may end up turning out a whole bunch of new ideas.

When you see the World through a lens that makes every product feature a boundary to be pushed, twisted and warped, creative thinking becomes infectious. And in the new World of software development, we need all the creative thinking we can get.

These are just some of my thoughts that I’ll be expanding on in the coming weeks - I’d be really keen to hear your ideas in the comments section.