An article by Robert L. Hampel in the Chronicle of Higher Education, “In Search of New Frontiers: How Scholars Generate Ideas”, has sparked some posts on science blogs:

• “Good Topics for Future Research - And How You Find Them” on Thus Spake Zuska
• “Factory of Ideas” on FemaleScienceProfessor

Hampel:

If graduate students cannot see how senior scholars generate and manage their ideas, then their induction is incomplete. Our students dutifully take research-methods courses, but every graduate seminar should discuss the wide range of sources of creative work. Otherwise our students will think in terms of the assignments we give them, when they should really be thinking about the assignments they can give themselves: interesting topics for future study.

FSP:

How do you teach someone to have ideas, other than by example? Isn’t absorbing the spirit of curiosity a major step towards generating ideas? As a student, you don’t have to be told explicitly by a professor “OK, now I am going to teach you how to generate ideas”. In grad school, you learn by doing, you learn by watching, you learn by absorbing, and then you figure out how you want to do things.

I definitely think it is good to have conversations with students and postdocs about some of the idea-generating concepts discussed by Hampel and Zuska (and her commenters), and I think that another important role for faculty and other advisors is to give students and postdocs the confidence to express and develop their own ideas.

In the course of our advising and teaching, we can provide information that helps our students and postdocs to develop ideas and recognize what is a good idea and what might not be such a good idea. As advisors, we also teach others how to follow through on an idea. That is, once you have an idea or a glimmer of one, what do you do about it?