What is Invention Thinking?

I was the kid who filled notebooks with sketches of inventions nobody asked for. A pen that never ran out of ink. A trash can that emptied itself. A backpack with a built-in fan. None of these ideas were good. None of them were original. But the act of having them, day after day, was building something in me that I didn't have a name for at the time. Years later, after starting Skypig and building Products: The Card Game, I'd come to understand it as invention thinking.

It's the cognitive habit underneath every entrepreneur, inventor, and creator I respect. And it's more learnable than most people realize.

How Invention Thinking Actually Works

Invention thinking is the practice of looking at the world as a set of problems waiting to be solved rather than a set of facts to be accepted. It's closely related to design thinking, but with a stronger emphasis on novelty — invention thinkers don't just improve existing things, they create things that didn't exist before.

The mental moves are recognizable. Notice something that bothers you. Ask "why does it have to be this way?" Generate possibilities, even bad ones. Pick one. Sketch it, prototype it, or describe it well enough that someone else could understand it. Get reactions. Adjust. Repeat. The cycle is simple. The discipline of running it consistently is what separates invention thinkers from the rest.

Programs run by groups like the Lemelson-MIT program have shown that this kind of thinking can be reliably developed in students through the right kinds of structured experiences. The students who go through these programs don't necessarily go on to file patents. But they do go on to think differently about problems for the rest of their lives.

The biggest enemy of invention thinking, in my experience, is self-censorship. Most people stop having ideas not because their idea-generating capacity has shut down, but because they've learned to filter their ideas before saying them out loud. They've decided which ideas are "stupid" or "won't work" before testing whether they actually are. Invention thinking, more than anything else, is the practice of letting the bad ideas come out so the good ones have a chance to follow.

How I've Tried to Build It in Others

When I designed Products: The Card Game, I made a deliberate choice to design the game around invention thinking rather than just entrepreneurship knowledge. Players draw random cards and have to invent a product on the spot — combinations that wouldn't otherwise occur to them, defended in front of an audience that's about to vote on the result. The game forces the loop that invention thinkers run naturally: notice, generate, defend, adjust.

I've watched this work in classrooms From high school classrooms to corporate offsites i've led. The patterns I see are remarkably consistent across very different settings. The shift in students after a few rounds is recognizable. They stop saying "I'm not creative" and start producing ideas they didn't know they had in them. It's not that they suddenly became creative. They just stopped censoring themselves long enough for the ideas to come out.

This connects to what I've written about invention education and invention-based learning — both are educational approaches built on the assumption that invention thinking is a teachable skill, not an innate gift. The research supports that view, and so does my own experience watching it develop in real students.

If you want to develop invention thinking in yourself or in students, my honest recommendation is to find low-stakes situations where you have to generate ideas regularly. Brainstorming exercises. Pitch games. Creative prompts that don't have a "right answer." Anything that gets you in the habit of producing ideas without immediately judging them. It's the same principle behind learning by doing — the skill develops through repeated use, not through being explained.

Invention thinking is the closest thing I've found to a true superpower. It's the muscle that lets you see possibilities other people miss, build things other people don't think to build, and eventually create the kind of work that didn't exist before you made it. It started, for me, with a notebook full of bad ideas in elementary school. It's never really stopped.