where do you get your ideas from

Question: where do you get your ideas from
- Keywords:
  inspiration
Asked by anon-233134 to Varun, Sammie, Rebecca, Anna, Alin, Adam on 12 Nov 2019.
- Varun Ramaswamy answered on 12 Nov 2019:
  
  We constantly read scientific articles that have been published in our field to know what’s going on there everyday…and as we do that, we realise that there are a few questions in those articles that haven’t been answered at all..and so we choose to find the answers to those ourselves.
  
  That’s the lovely thing about reading scientific journals. You end up gaining knowledge and giving knowledge when you publish your findings too!
- Rebecca Shaw answered on 12 Nov 2019: last edited 12 Nov 2019 1:14 pm
  
  As Varun said, many researchers get ideas from either trying to provide evidence that something a group of researchers tried works or finding gaps in the science community and addressing this gap.
  We do this by reading scientific articles which many are open access and available to to everyone.
  
  Other ways in which we can get idea’s is by going out and meeting other scientists. We attend conferences (sometimes in lovely exotic places), guest lectures and seminars based on our topic of interest and meet other researchers who are working in the same field. Often, just discussing our interests, problems which we have in our research or techniques we haven’t tried can inspire and give us a new outlook on our work!
- Adam Washington answered on 12 Nov 2019:
  
  A large number of my “new” ideas from come taking two recent ideas and trying to combine them. For example, a colleague needed help aligning some samples for a measurement. I’d also recently read an article about how a new (well, new to me) branch of algebra was really good at aligning robot arms. So I combined the two and asked if this new algebra would be as good at aligning samples as it was at aligning robots. It turned out that it was.
  
  As a different example, we’d been working on how bird’s created the colour in their feathers. We’d recently encountered the fact that many birds that we think of as blue are actually closer to ultra-violet, which birds can see, but we can’t. I also knew that ultra-violet was light that was too far past blue to see, while infrared was too far past red to see. So, I combined the two ideas and started looking to see if there were any animals creating colours in the same way that the birds do, but were turning themselves infra-red, instead of ultra-violet. And it was those two ideas that started me on my polar bear research hobby.
- Anna Kalorkoti answered on 13 Nov 2019:
  
  For me, a lot of it comes from talking to colleagues and finding out what they’re interested in or working on–often hearing what someone else is doing can spark a new idea of how you can use something similar in your own work. However, the company I work for is very big, & sometimes different teams don’t talk to each other or share ideas as much as they should! To help encourage people to talk to each other more, I started organising “tech talks” at lunchtimes, where one person talks about their work & anyone is welcome to come, listen, and ask questions (we also “persuade” people to come along by providing free food…), and I hope this is helping more people to have more ideas.
  
  Like Rebecca and Varun have already said, reading scientific articles is also a good way to get ideas, but I prefer talking to people because you can ask them questions to get more information, or bounce ideas off each other.
- Alin Elena answered on 14 Nov 2019:
  
  there is no place to get ideas from, at least in science. you read a lot, you think a lot and you start to make new connections between various things this is how new ideas come about.
- Samantha Firth answered on 14 Nov 2019:
  
  I ask loads of questions and talk to lots of people and attend lots of events – the more i know about whats going on, the more connections i make and the more material i have to work with 🙂

Question: where do you get your ideas from

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