How do people come up with innovative ideas such as google, the computer, and modern medicine?

Question

How do people come up with innovative ideas such as google, the computer, and modern medicine?

Answer 1

Nobody came up with any of these all out of the blue.  In each case, the idea was based on a series of other inventions and discoveries.

Google is basically just like a telephone directory service that's built on top of the world-wide web.  There were similar directories that were built for things that came before the WWW, such as the Archie service for FTP sites.  There were other directories (search engines) for WWW even before Google; Google just had a better strategy for building and managing their directory.

The modern computer is essentially just a fancy calculator.  People have been studying math for thousands of years.  Once you can build a device to store binary numbers and perform simple binary operations, it's just a few more steps until you've got a computer.  The two biggest breakthroughs for computers were (1) the discovery of the transistor, and (2) the idea of putting transistors and circuits onto silicon wafers.

Modern medicine is the result of millions of studies; essentially trying things out and seeing what works and what doesn't.  Of course it's more than trial and error as medicine goes hand-in-hand with science and understanding how & why things work.

Inventors study what is already known, then put together a couple of existing ideas in a new way that wasn't done before, or sometimes they see something that was done in one area of life and they apply it to another area.

To put it another way, ideas are almost always based on other ideas (they rarely come out of the blue).  If you want to invent something new, you first need to fill your head with lots of ideas (ie, you need to study).