I'm sorry, but I don't think this is true at all. Like not even remotely. The closest thing I could say is that prescriptions are almost never sufficient to ach

I'm sorry, but I don't think this is true at all. Like not even remotely. The closest thing I could say is that prescriptions are almost never sufficient to achieve real innovation, but that's a far cry from "dead end." It's like saying that flu vaccines are a "dead end" because they don't cure AIDS. Sure, they may not be not sufficient, but no one would want to get the flu without an immune system. We should find it shocking how many "new" things aren't really that new, but just looking at some existing problem slightly askew and seeing a cleaner arrangement. Pure accident is likely an even bigger cause of the new. This is true of the invention of calculus to the discovery of penicillin. (Does anyone seriously find it mysterious that Leibniz and Newton independently invented calculus at roughly the same time?) "Prescriptions" themselves often take the form of a procedure or algorithm that is used to improve some instrumental or operational aspect of achieving the new. If I follow the Pomodoro technique, for instance, that's not new, but it might help me actually stay a bit more focused and even creative. Maybe it won't. It's just a prescription, it's not going to change my life by itself, but it might move me in the right direction. Finally, prescriptions can often help us do "dimensionality reduction" on the present and help filter out a lot of the extra _signal_ (not just the noise) from the present, which is simply too vivid for a human to process. Our brains do this normally with most sensory-level information, but we can use prescriptions as sort of a higher-order, more conscious variant of this. Since most genuinely new things actually involve tearing down a complex thing and rearranging it just a bit better, filtering out everything except for what is most likely to help you solve a problem (and thus create something new) can make you much more productive and see the problem more clearly. I'd also observe that most great artists find some set of constraints under which to work. Picasso was excellent at producing classical-style art (most great artists actually are, contrary to popular "my-five-year-old-paints-better" bullshit), but constrained himself to imagining the objects of his paintings as cubes. Monet, Manet and Van Gogh constrained themselves to seeing a very short (possibly infinitesimal) glimpse. I have had Hollywood screenwriters say to me that they can get nothing done if they don't constrain themselves in some way, even if it's something like "I'm writing sci-fi today." TL;DR: Prescriptions are all they're cracked up to be, and nothing more; (almost) never sufficient but often necessary.