The joy of inventing

'Inventing is like sex,' says Ernest Nagy, 'the more you do it the better you get at it ... and you have to be able to work interactively with other people. I want to give confidence to the thousands of others with latent talent. When you create something and see it manifest itself, it is very spiritually uplifting. I'm not really worried that I'm not going to be a zillionaire.'

Nagy claims that a subsidiary of the US corporation Johnson and Johnson modelled a research team on his unorthodox approach to generating ideas. This is based on much experimentation on subjects you know little about. He says the best ideas that have come from his employees are always from the 'idiots' in his workforce - those with no background in science, and no preconceptions about what can and cannot be done. 'You cannot discover something if you know it's there. You should always come from a position of ignorance.'