Innovation springs from the most unlikely of places, and also from the most likely. New ideas are hard to come up with, yet at the same time new things crop up almost at random. This is the unexpected. That event, good or bad, or perhaps completely unrelated, that somehow manages to change you, your community, your industry, or even your world.

As I believe we spoke about in class, Post-it notes were discovered in this way - a bad event. The glue that they were supposed to be developing was terrible. It was weak, and could barely hold anything together. But somebody had the thought - "Hey, what if we put this on paper?" And so the Post-it note was born.

People want to live in a 'perfect world'. Everybody wants to have everything that they ever wanted, not having to worry about bills, or food, or if the people they care about are safe - this doesn't exist. It can't exist. This issue was addressed by Mr. Smith in the Matrix, when he tells Morpheus about the first Matrix - how it was a perfect world. People's minds rejected it: to achieve, and know that you have achieved, perfection, the human mind seems to have an object of comparison - other people.

Much in the same way, innovation can stem from an incongruity in our lives. How we want to perceive the world, and how it actually is. The space for innovation lies somewhere bridging that gap. Can you create something that can bring people closer to the perfection that they crave? And is it better enough than the current options available to create a sense of elevation in the person who has what you created compared to one who doesn't?

The way your world, and the people in it, work can and will change the way you  think. As a white kid growing up in an urban setting, I have a very different perception of certain things than many of my friends, who graduated from my high school, a small private college-prep school. To them, there isn't as much of a sense of "street smarts", and in the same way, I feel out of place in suburban streets, and my thought process changes. What's around you will affect how you think - there are studies showing that people are more creative when they are sitting in a blue room compared to a red one, or a white one. The people around you, the social demographic, only do more to add to your altered environment. New ways of thought, sparking new roads, new ideas, and finally - something new. That is the creative process.