I'm not sure I buy "invention", the creation of something new. I prefer to ask questions that determine whether people are able to mine their own experience an

I'm not sure I buy "invention", the creation of something new. I prefer to ask questions that determine whether people are able to mine their own experience and apply solutions from one domain to another entirely different domain. It seems to me, that most invention is finding novel approaches to existing problems, and that most problems already have solutions that just need to be discovered and matched up with their problem. The harder part is that it is usually the case that the solution is in a different problem domain than the problem at hand. The most inventive people I know are the ones who are open to learning everything, who consume all knowledge and are always listening. These people store solutions in a problem-domain invariant way, such that when they encounter a problem they already know the solution even though it's non-trivial for everyone else.