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What Is Creative? - Part 6

Creativeness, or an idea, has a dual nature: it is both construc­tive and destructive. An idea can give us a new way of doing something or a new approach to thinking—but only at the expense of giving up an old way of doing something or an old way of thinking. And we are not, remember, referring to the ideas which have destruction as their only objective. We are concerned solely with that creativity which does meet our test of bringing a benefit with its change.

It has been said that the creativeness of American business is almost   wholly   responsible   for   the   tremendous   growth   and industrial strength of our country today. But, at the same time, this beneficial creativeness is one of the most destructive forces an industrial era has ever known. Just consider:

Any new product introduced on the market can win ac­ceptance only if the public at large is willing to abandon an old way of satisfying the same need. Every new production method adopted means the end of a former way of doing some­thing. Every new material designed into a product means that a former material has lost a use.

One of the relatively unknown great dramas of American industry centered around the progressiveness of a new idea battling the old established way: In 1882, a young man named Nikola Tesla invented an electric generator for producing alternating current—the type of current that supplies the electrical needs of most of the world today. But in 1882, the only electric power in general use was direct current produced by the generators invented by Thomas A. Edison. This system was costly to install —requiring an expensive generator for about every 2 square miles. And it was costly to operate. But it was also highly profit­able. And the people who were realizing those profits weren't about to give them up easily. So Tesla found that none of the established companies in the field would handle his new system. It was not until several years later, when Tesla was discovered by George Westinghouse, that he was able to get the financial and production backing to put his alternating current generators into use. The rest, of course, is electrical history.

An example of how a creative insight can destroy years of preconceived notions is observed in the discovery back in 1910, by Dr. Francis Peyton Rous of the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research, that a certain type of animal cancer was caused by a filterable virus. This challenged the one basic thing that all medical researchers knew—or thought they knew—about cancer: it was not an infectious disease, which it would have to be if it were caused by a virus. Many respected researchers of the day flatly refused to believe that Rous was right, even after he went on to find other types of animal cancers that were also caused by viruses. Today, of course, no line of investigation into the origins of cancer is being pursued more vigorously than the one aimed at finding virus causes. But several generations of thinking had to be changed before this hopeful situation came about.

So it is a natural condition of all creative advances—all worth­while new ideas—that they will have to overcome previous thought patterns, habits, and accepted ways before they can enjoy the success of their own acceptance. Some ideas are so obviously good that they win acceptance easily. But even many ideas which are obviously good to many people do not win general acceptance purely because of the natural resistance people have to giving up a familiar or understood way of doing things in favor of a somewhat uncertain new way. The job of winning acceptance for a new idea may require more creativeness than did getting the original idea.

Once acceptance is gained, however, it may be the beginning of a period of rapid advancement in commercial adaptation and refinement of the new idea. The history of ideas shows that most long-term developments and expansions occur in "spurts" —rapid progress, followed by "breath-catching" slower periods when we search out weaknesses which indicate new directions to research. Following these new directions can, in turn, result in our discovery of still another new fundamental which, in its turn, will touch off another spurt.

After all, human knowledge is just an accumulation of small facts and assumed facts. As the experience of generation after generation successively confirms or denies those facts, we build them into our knowledge. And it is the same with ideas: one leads to another, and the growth of human progress in every field—the arts, business, science, medicine, or human relations —is based on the progressive addition of one new idea to another, or to another group of ideas, to form a new entity that is a creative whole in itself. Two examples, one from science and one from industry, will serve to show this progression from one idea to another and the pyramiding effects this progression can have on humanity:

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