How Science can Influence Your Creativity

The difference between art and science is really that art is based on science, in my opinion. The science is creating the foundation of insight which may or may not see it in a very secret light about where this brand has to go. It’s that little nugget which can tell you about where a brand is going or where it should go.  

Now, you need to do your homework first and find out: what does that science tell you? Once you’ve done that, guess what you have to do? You have to park it for a second. 

With that in mind, you now have to be creative. Creativity for me is to take two ordinary things and combine them in a new way. That is creativity. And when you have this information in your mind, this science data, you actually will notice that that will influence the way you combine those two ordinary things in a new way. 

Let me give you an example. If you take LEGO, when LEGO went through the evolution of going into the digital space – which happened back in 1994, and I know the process very well because I was there during it – then you would realize that LEGO is of course ordinary plastic bricks. But what about the new technology? How do you take that and combine it with LEGO in a new way? Which became Mindstorms – the idea of putting a computer chip into every LEGO brick. That idea is really fundamental for everything. But that was based on science, it was based on understanding the consumer in a very extreme degree so that once it was developed and launched it would stay in the market. 

So for me, science is the first step, the art is the second step – but they both are equally important.