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Sunday, I asked for your comments on three inspirations for innovation and creativity. If you missed the original, please take a moment to go back and read it first. If you didn’t, be aware that I give away the ending to the Caine film below.

I’m writing this on Sunday, immediately after posing my question to you, and posting it on Tuesday, as promised. Hopefully a few of you have added your wisdom. And here’s what I think:

1. Chris Brogan is spot on when he says you don’t achieve greatness by following the existing paradigm. You conceive the ultimate goal—hopefully something big and bold—and then engineer a path from today’s world to that goal.

Examples:

• Steve Jobs envisioning a “computer for the rest of us,” or a whole music library that fits in a shirt pocket
• Amory Lovins achieving energy-sustainable construction by creating buildings that don’t need a furnace or air conditioner (and the savings on capital cost pay for the energy improvements)
• Zsolt Varga’s ingenious Kenguru: a tiny car that transports one person in his or her wheelchair, without needing any hydraulic lifts
• A goal of conserving water led Bill and Jane Monetti to enormous water savings without any need to redesign plumbing systems—just from reducing the need to flush

2. A number of lessons to be learned from “Caine’s Arcade”:

• Caine’s parents were wise enough not to interfere, not to assault their son with messages that what he was trying t do was impossible, useless, or even misdirected. They gave him room to follow his dream.
• For Caine, it was enough to build it even when people didn’t come—just as for me, I’m driven to write my blog, my monthly column, and my books even though my audiences are small. Because I know that a few people do passionately pay attention to my ideas, it gives me a lot of juice to keep going. Of course, if I had the fame of a Chris Brogan or Seth Godin, I’d reach a lot more people. And that would harmonize with my own goals to change the world. But just knowing that I have changed the lives of a few people and the course of a few communities helps me keep going. I’m not sure I’m as brave as Caine, though. I’m not sure I could do it anymore if I didn’t think anyone at all was listening.
• The missing ingredient in both Emerson’s “build a better mousetrap and people will beat a path to your door” and director Phil Alden Robinson and writer W. P. Kinsella’s “if you build it, they will come” is marketing. While Caine says he doesn’t care if anyone comes to play, he tells us of feeling excluded and teased when he tried to share his accomplishment at school. And his reaction when his lone customer brings a crowd to play shows that while just the achievement had been enough for Caine, sharing it with others is so much more. Nirvan, that solitary customer, did the marketing for him, and did a fabulous job. The happy ending is as much a testament to Nirvan’s social media prowess as to Caine’s creativity and ingenuity—just as the rise of Apple needed both Jobs’ vision and marketing skills and Steve Wozniak’s engineering genius. The lesson for entrepreneurs is that if you don’t have all three elements—vision, engineering, and marketing—you need to partner with someone who has the pieces you lack.

3. The actual ad featured in the going green video is a brilliant example of using big-picture thinking to convey a message. Take a walk—and find your true love. Yes, it’s absurd. But it’s also very compelling. and it talks most elegantly to the way people can change behavior and become greener—achieving both a planetary and a personal good.

Much traditional advertising of for-profit products and nonprofit causes focuses on one or the other: buy this car or smoke this cigarette and you’ll feel sexy, that sort of thing—or “only you can prevent forest fires,” give money to cancer research, etc.—helping-others messaging without a clear direct benefit.

As a green marketer, I constantly say that marketers need to hit both the self-interst and the planetary interest, especially if they want to reach beyond the deep greens. In fact, I wrote my last Green And Profitable column on this very theme. The ad is a nice example, and the opening slides give us some very good framing about the power of art to influence thought, in many contexts.

Without starting with that intention, I’ve been immersing myself in “creativity juice” this morning. A whole bunch of the e-mails I’ve opened have, by random chance (if there is such a thing), forced me to think about how creativity happens,  what it means, and whether “if you build it, they will come”—a/k/a, in the pre-”Field of Dreams” world as the better mousetrap aphorism—has relevance in today’s world.

Today, I’ll share three of these inspirations with you: the raw material. And I’ll write down what I think about this confluence, but set it to post on Tuesday—because I want your reactions before you see mine. Please comment below.

1. This quote from @ChrisBrogan:

When I think about all that a business can do to succeed (or all that an individual can do, for that matter), I start from the mindset of forgetting about the path that someone else has forged. Why? Because innovation rarely (never?) comes from following an established path. If I were going to design a hotel, I wouldn’t try learning what worked and didn’t work for the Four Seasons, I’d think through (and then interview others about) all the details that matter to me as a traveler, and then consider what I could do better.

I’ve been an Apple user since I got my first Mac in 1984. One of his greatest contributions was to make computers much more accessible to non-geeks. It would have been a lot longer learning curve on a pre-windows IBM PC or even an Apple II. MacWrite 1.0 and WYSIWYG [what-you-see-is-what-you-get—a major innovation in computers at that time] completely revolutionized the way I wrote resumes, which were my major service line at the time (and which I still do, occasionally)–plus made it much easier to develop template documents, etc. Four of my eight books started as earlier books. In 1979, I turned in the MS for my first book, which was a co-authored rewrite of a much older book–with pieces of the original book spliced into my typed out pages with scissors and tape. The other three were all upgraded from books I’d written earlier after getting a computer (one of them on that original 1984 machine)l it was SO much easier!

And just this summer, I found a new use for one of Jobs’ newest technologies: Using an iPad with the seaprate Apple wireless keyboard, I can type to my deaf stepfather while he holds the screen and reads what I’m saying in real time. Much better than passing a laptop back and forth or shouting in his ear.

Thank you, Steve Jobs, for the many innovations that have made the world brighter and made my personal life easier.

For more on Jobs’ life and legacy, among the thousands of articles out there, this one on the Macworld site is quite good.

You’ve all heard, “Necessity is the Mother of Invention.” Well, perhaps that’s true. But another parent might be frustration: wanting to do something better, more easily, faster than you currently can.

Yes, some products are developed to fill a need we haven’t known we had. Advances in portable technology, from the beach transistor radio and Sony Walkman to smart phones and PDAs, have often come up to create whole new markets once we realized that these devices we never had were indispensable. Ditto with kitchen technology improvements, like the microwave oven (I still don’t have one of those, by the way). Maybe we could call this “visionary innovation.” A lot of the really big sweeping changes come from these types of innovations: telephones, personal computers, solar collectors, bicycles…

But other innovations clearly arise because someone got frustrated by the limitations of what existed. Thomas Edison went through 10,000 experiments before he could develop a workable light bulb. Would he have had the patience for that long quest if he hadn’t felt frustrated that the dark hours were so unproductive? Certainly the idea of lighting a room has existed since the discovery of fire, thousands of years ago. But the need for better lighting became much more acute as the 19th century brought not only the Industrial Revolution (with big dark factory spaces to be illuminated) but also a mass culture that began to read actively.

Look at Google: Existing web search tools were very frustrating in the mid-1990s. To completely change the paradigm of how material was scanned by searchbots in order to achieve not only faster and more accurate searches but also a much cleaner interface was likely a response to the clumsiness of Yahoo and Alta Vista at the time.

I’m not an inventor, but I am an innovator. A few years ago, I registered some domains for what I thought was a very cool concept: Enter a budget for airfare, enter available departure and return dates (and how much latitude you had with each of those), possible departure airports, choose domestic or international, and have the site spit back suggestions for actual trips you could book (I remember that one of the domains was wherecanifly.com). This came directly out of my frustration trying to plan a trip without having a clear destination and having to laboriously enter itinerary after itinerary.

I still think it’s a brilliant idea, and one that would be easy to fund with venture capital, advertising, and commissions on travel services. But programmers I talked to told me that was a lot harder to engineer than it seemed. After a year of not finding anyone willing to run with it, I let those domains expire. (Anyone want to run with this, talk to me about being your marketing director ).

People like R. Buckminster Fuller and Amory Lovins seem to have an almost magical ability to fuse the visionary and the frustrated; they harness their frustrations not for the obvious incremental solution, but for something new and deep and very exciting—and they also have a certain inventor’s ADD. The present is never enough for them; they’re always on a quest for something new and strange and wonderful

Both Fuller and Lovins had an impact in industry after industry—reinventing construction, transportation, industrial manufacturing…whatever struck them as in need of improvement.

Right now, I’m in the process of launching the International Association of Earth-Conscious Marketers: a trade association for Green marketers. I hope that what comes out of this will also be a fusion of the best in these twin fathers of innovation.