Creative thought is the lifeblood of innovation. Only it's hard to think creatively in the middle of the daily grind. Individuals and companies have grappled with this conundrum for ages: IBM was famous for the "Think" signs that once permeated its offices. But the dilemma seems more pronounced than ever in today's era of e-mail, cell phones, and general 24/7 blur. When I do have time to think, I often think about how to think better.

In the mid-1980s, I reported a Time cover story on the idea that asteroids or comets hitting the earth had created a global dust storm that choked off sunlight and disrupted the food chain, ultimately causing the dinosaurs' extinction. The theory's chief originator was the late Nobel Prizewinning physicist Luis Alvarez. Alvarez was not just a great scientist but a National Inventors Hall of Fame inductee whose inventions included an aircraft blind-landing system, which saved many lives by providing pilots a radar-guided path in poor-visibility conditions, and a photographic lens that became standard in Polaroid cameras.