Good Idea! Now find a better one.

New Scientist has a brief but interesting post on a California inventor’s technique for using an ornamental piece like a vase as a speaker. What’s interesting about this is not that you can make sounds with a vase. Tap a vase with your knuckles and you’ll make a sound.

It’s also not new to attach some sort of apparatus to a vase or any other hard object to create a sound. For 20 bucks, you can turn your bookcase into a speaker.

No, what is most significant about this is that Ideas, Inventions, and Innovations don’t occur in a vacuum. And the shortest path to a new solution is to focus on the benefit that you want, not the tools that you have.

So, if you want music to emanate from the center of your room but you want a large vase instead of a speaker there, what do you do?

You could start with your tools, with what you have, and try to disguise, embellish or redesign a normal speaker - Or you can start with what you want, a beautiful vase, and find new and different ways to make it produce sound.

Too often we look at what tools we have and let that define what we can do. We let an employee’s or coworker’s title define what they can do. We let a technique’s historical uses define its future purpose.

Focus on the benefit that you or your organization values and like the California inventor, find a way.