And Speaking of Creative Repackaging…

The New York Times ran an article back in May chronicling how two brothers stumbled upon some boxes in their grandfather’s attic and ended up starting their own company to exploit a new use for their grandfather’s forgotten invention.
The story goes like this:
In the late 1960s, a fun-loving entrepreneur named Bill Smith came up with a brilliant idea for how skiers could enjoy really steep, deep slopes without getting out of control. Called the Ski-Klipper, his invention was, essentially, a small, controllable sail/drag chute a skier could deploy from a backpack to slow them down on a steep descent. The idea had promise … until a Vail ski resort banned his product. So, he packed his unsold backpack sails away in the attic … where his two grandsons found them, 40 years later.
The two young men started experimenting with the sails to see what they might be good for … and came up with the idea of modifying them for use by skateboarders instead of skiers. Renamed the Sporting-Sail, the sails have elastic loops at all four corners. The bottom two loops attach to the skateboarder’s thighs, and the top two loops are held in each hand. The skateboarder can then open, close and open the sail again, like a spinnaker on a sailboat (in reverse), to control their speed on a steep downhill. The brothers received a patent on the idea in 2010 and have sold about 700 of the units so far.
To Bob Sutton’s point in my previous post about creativity and repackaging, Nick and Billy Smith didn’t come up with their Sporting-Sail out of the blue … or, as my mother would say, out of broad cloth. They had their grandfather’s invention as a starting point, for one thing. But they also had something equally important: a family history of curious tinkering and exploration that left them well-prepared to take their grandfather’s sails and figure out a new and better use for them. In the article, the brothers talk about a childhood spent making things in the family garage, and how both their parents and their grandfather encouraged all that creative exploration.
Nonetheless, creative inspiration still involves a little bit of alchemy. A childhood that encourages creative thinking and exploration may help prepare the ground so that a person stumbles upon a seed like an old ski sail in an attic, it can take root and grow into a new idea or invention. But that moment of germination, where that alternate vision takes form, is still an unpredictable and somewhat magical process that’s hard to pin down. Which is, of course, part of the challenge … as well as part of the fun.