How creative thinkers are making millions

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April 29, 2025 | 12:00am

When meeting your team, how would you encourage them to think creatively? There’s one option. Show them a piece of rock, approximately the size of five-by-six inches in diameter. Aside from a rock, you can use almost anything, like a common item to help people become creative thinkers.

Do it through a visual presentation or much better with an actual sample.

You have to do this within a proper context, such as when you want your teams to increase sales, eliminate operational waste, improve brand image and more.

In my seminar on creative thinking, I would ask the participants to come up with many different ways to tweak a rock into something more valuable than its original state. To avoid copying from one another, I asked them to write their ideas on a piece of paper the size of a calling card for tabulation later by a training assistant.

When I posed this activity to 25 managers, some were not bothered by exposing their different personalities with absurd examples like a gross booger bank, a used chewing gum depository and a callus remover for sadists.

Other examples include – a defense weapon, paper holder, knife sharpener, aquarium décor, car tire wedge, paper weight, candle holder, bookmarker, wishing rock, secret door key marker, sanctuary for aquarium tropical fish, bug hotel, desk display, incense holder, door stopper, photo holder, church symbol and the “first stone.”

Not bad. These are ordinary suggestions that could be made into something extraordinary depending on where you’re seated. I was enamored by the last two ideas – one as a church symbol for Peter, the Rock, and two as “the first stone” as described in John 8:7.

These were fitting examples when the seminar was done on the first Wednesday after Easter Sunday.

Quiet brainstorming

The result was extraordinary compared to what I’ve done in the past three months for other organizations. I told the participants to do quiet brainstorming, a.k.a brainwriting, where they’re allowed to copy or piggy-back on the ideas of others minus the fiery discussions that allowed stupid ideas to flourish.

Yellow pad sheets were passed on to each of the four groups. The instruction was easy and simple. List down as many ideas as you can write. As soon as one has listed one idea, that person is required to pass the yellow pad sheet to another person and down the line.

No debate is needed.

The group with the greatest number of ideas wins a token prize from the sponsoring organization.

The goal is to get ideas from other creative thinkers, but ensure that they twist them to create a different idea from the original. For example, a rock paperweight could be redesigned to be a pet cradle rock with a space for a photo of one’s favorite dog.

Speaking of a pet cradle rock, there was an actual pet rock invented, marketed and sold by marketing genius Gary Dahl (1936-2015). It was in 1975 when Dahl and his friends talked about the hassles of pet ownership.

He had a light bulb moment that prompted him to create a “perfect pet” minus the hassles in caring for it. He bought beautiful, smooth stones from Mexican beaches for less than a penny and marketed them using cardboard boxes resembling pet carriers with air holes, straw bedding and an amusing 36-page instruction manual titled “The Care and Training of Your Pet Rock.”

The craze lasted for only six months but more than enough to make Dahl a millionaire. By the way, the original Pet Rock is still available at $29.99 via Amazon.

Several weeks ago, researchers and scientists from the University of California and the University of Washington announced the discovery of a new color that can only be seen when firing a laser into one’s retina. In an article by Elissaveta Brandon in Fast Company, she reports that before, “only five people could see the world’s newest color” until British flamboyant and multidisciplinary artist Stuart Semple bottled and sold it for everyone.

Semple reverse-engineered the blue-green shade called “Olo” and marketed it as an acrylic paint color called “Yolo.” Brandon says that “Yolo is a color you cannot see – at least not accurately – unless you buy a bottle of the acrylic paint and see it with your own eyes.

A 150-milliliter bottle costs $10,000 for every Tom, Dick and Harry public but if you’re an artist like Semple, you can buy it for $35 apiece. He retaliated against Anish Kapoor, a British-Indian sculptor exclusive rights to the super-black pigment Vantablack by releasing “PINK – the world’s pinkest pink paint” and clearly prohibited Kapoor from purchasing it.

Semple continued this initiative by empowering other artists to access other proprietary colors, like Tiffany Blue and International Klein Blue.

Color hues are often taken for granted unless one is part of the visual arts community. It has become big business in the fashion, technology, brands and marketing world. Color inventors like Semper and Kapoor are turning pigments, paints and even digital hues into intellectual property and monetizing them in creative (and sometimes controversial) ways.

Examples include trademark colors like Tiffany Blue, Louboutin Red and Barbie Pink which improved their brand equity. Now, go forth and do creative thinking. It’s not an exclusive tool for artists and inventors. Turn pebbles, color hues and rocks into paychecks. And wait for your spouse or partner to thank you.

Rey Elbo is a quality and productivity improvement enthusiast. Message him via Facebook, LinkedIn, X, or email [email protected] or https://reyelbo.com. Anonymity is guaranteed.