strategy for innovation—beyond the more unpredictable role of creative intuition How we conceive reality—cells, molecules, galaxies, cosmic radiation—is largely shaped by how our tools let us see them. Scientific creativity and imagination expand not just by closing our eyes, but especially by opening them and looking through powerful instruments. These tools reveal entirely new structures and patterns in the world we could never have conceived with the naked eye and just thought: x-ray crystallography uncovered the elegant double-helix spiral structure of DNA that Watson and Crick modelled after observing the diffraction pattern. The Hooker Telescope at Mount Wilson Observatory enabled Edwin Hubble to observe galaxies beyond the Milky Way and the universe expanding—unimaginable concepts before telescope resolution advanced. Functional MRI scanners exposed real-time mapping of brain activity via blood flow, revealing the brain areas involved in memory, vision, emotion or decision-making. In other words, we could not imagine how the brain works in such ways but we directly saw it in real time. Particle accelerators uncovered the traces of particles observed in high-energy collisions. Automated DNA sequencing and sequence-tagged site maps revealed the human genome—an unconceivable genetic code consisting of three billion letters. These discoveries make up central pillars of science—how we understand life and the universe—and they did not form from just deep introspection, but from what our extraordinary tools see and measure. This is a key insight that has been overlooked. Imagination is limited to what the mind can conceive—but tools vastly expand what is observable and thus conceivable. If we cannot measure something, it is hard even to conceive of it scientifically—and our tools are what enable us to measure. Tools do not just confirm ideas, they generate them. Scientific progress has commonly stalled when tools stagnate, regardless of imagination: fields like theoretical physics and theoretical economics plateau when they lack new applied methods to explore and test models. Today, the greatest leaps in science have emerged largely from ourexternal interactions with tools, not just from internal introspection. Scientific tools are often thought of as just answering our questions, but they actually generate more new questions we did not even know to ask. Tools turn the unknown into the visible and imaginable. Scientific creativity emerges largely outside the mind: from what our tools see, detect, measure, simulate and model. They have vastly expanded the very space of creativity itself. This is the key difference, because outside of science, creativity can often spring from within—the imagination of the artist, poet or composer expressing an inner vision through pens, paintbrushes or musical instruments. With the lens of instruments driving what is imaginable in science today, let us look at how we develop our remarkable instruments. Science's powerful tools do not emerge from sudden creative sparks but rather inventors describe how they run into the limits of a current tool and work systematically to overcome the methodological bottleneck (as we highlighted earlier in this chapter and in the Boxes throughout the book). What inspires developing science's top tools is not just creative intuition. It is instead practical needs: increasing the power of microscopes, boosting the efficiency of particle accelerators, optimising the sensitivity of spectrometers, strengthening the robustness of statistical methods, sharpening the resolution of chromatography techniques and so on. Innovation and curiosity start when hitting a methodological wall. When screening science's major discoveries, we find that recognising a constraint to a current tool commonly involves systematic steps: we design and experiment with prototypes of the tool, gather resources, leverage emerging technologies, test how effective the new tool is or at times bring together methods and collaborations from different fields. Systematically, we can trace these observable steps in the discovery process—but not always an individual creative idea. Tool generation is a practical strategy—requiring problem solving and often trial and error—that has proven very successful by upgrading, integrating and reorganising existing tools into something more powerful. What is called an individual's creative innovation can be better understood here as strategic development or recombination that different researchers can adopt; these strategic steps can be thought of as intentional or systematic creativity. Hundreds of discoveries emerge by applying a new lens, sensor or technique or by importing a new tool from one field into another or merging two methods from different fields to solve a problem in an entirely new way (Chapter 1). It does not matter if we label this systematic or imaginative thinking. These are powerful strategies we have in our hands to intentionally drive innovation—while creativity can play a role in forming hypotheses, concepts and interpretations. Tool creation underscores a deliberate design: we find that, first, science's transformative tools are born from necessity, not creative intuition; and secondly, science's major discoveries depend more on intentionally designing and applying new tools than the creative insights that the tools can enable. Unlike creativity that is often seen as elusive, generating and applying tools embodies the most deliberate, strategic and measurable part of science. Tools make science cumulative, reliable and replicable because they allow other researchers to arrive at the same findings using the same techniques. Even the most celebrated creative insights of Einstein, Planck, Darwin and others were only possible because of the tools and methods they directly or indirectly relied on, as we highlighted earlier. Here we reframe scientific progress as an active pursuit of building and using new lenses to the world, outlining a more practical strategy than the notion of creative genius. We find that discovery is far less about stumbling upon ingenious, unpredictable insights and far more about engineering insights by constructing better ways to see, sense and think about the world. Scientific progress is less about intangible brilliant minds and more about tangible brilliant methods that make those surprising insights possible in the first place. Building the sharpest lenses enables the brightest insights and theories to arise. The more intentionally we build, the more imaginatively we can think. With this tool-driven understanding of discovery, researchers can become aware and begin solving method limitations we face. With each new tool we use, our ability to see, generate ideas and our imaginative potential grow. Here we shift the traditional idea of creativity—often associated with an individual mind, as in art, music or literature—to recognise that in science today, creativity is instead largely driven by our tools that transform how we see, think and imagine—and do so for multiple researchers. In many ways, tools have become the central engine of creativity and imagination in science, fuelling our capacity to ask completely new questions and solve entirely new problems like nothing else can. The best strategy we have to foster creative insights is commonly upgrading the tools with which they can arise—just as with serendipitous insights (Chapter 2). So if one thinks of creativity as the spark for some discoveries, then tools are the fuel that enable the creative insight. There are some exceptional cases—most notably in theoretical physics—where concepts have been developed like gravitational waves and black holes, by applying sophisticated methods like tensor calculus and building on existing findings using interferometers and telescopes. While we cannot force new breakthroughs, we can play an enormous role in actively spurring them by directing much more attention to improving our tools. This brings a powerful shift in how we think about innovation: we should not wait for it to happen—we need to design and build our way to it. This moves us from just celebrating lone geniuses—a concept especially of past centuries—to empowering the method-makers who drive progress. The concept of scientific genius in earlier eras centred on theoretical insight—as exemplified by Einstein as the most iconic scientist in history. But science has become increasingly tool-driven so that science in the future will arguably shift the focus to our extraordinary toolmakers—the great and brilliant researchers who make new theories possible. We need to replace the traditional view of discovery as a product of solitary genius—imaginative and theoretical minds—with the tool-driven view of discovery. Even if the romantic mind view feels more inspiring than the mechanical, replicable tool view, the core power of science shifted over time from our minds to the sophisticated tools of science. For tools like electron microscopes and x-ray crystallography vastly surpass the human mind in perceiving, testing and sparking theories about the world. The new methods-driven discovery theory 'No theory exists that can reliably predict which research activities are most likely to lead to scientific advances' , as the National Research Council in the United States confirms. Yet by drawing here on the evidence from science's major discoveries, we introduce a new framework: the new methods-driven discovery theory. What the theory explains is simple but powerful: new methods and tools unlock new discoveries by enabling us to see, measure and understand the world in ways that are impossible without them. The theory explains how new breakthroughs are preceded by a leap in the way we access and understand the world through new methods. Earlier, we highlighted diverse strands of evidence illustrating this causaltool-to-discovery link across science's greatest breakthroughs that were otherwise not possible (in Chapter 1's section on causality). A core insight in society and an economy is that major advances in human wellbeing and development are commonly fuelled by technological changes that stem from deliberate human choices—from light bulbs to phones and channelling solar energy. Here, we uncover in science that major discoveries and fields are powered by method innovation that arises from the intentional decisions of researchers to craft and deploy new tools. New advances emerge when we do not just produce research with the same existing tools but shift our very means of producing research by adopting new tools to create knowledge from an entirely new perspective. It is no coincidence that the driving force of major advances in society and an economy (new technologies) is so similar to the driving force of major advances in science (new scientific methods and tools). Before we go further, let us return briefly to the definitions of the central terms here. Major discoveries are defined as new breakthroughs that mark entirely new ways to understand the world, open new paths of inquiry and later have a proven, lasting impact on science—such as uncovering the structure of DNA and exoplanets. Scientific methods are systematic techniques, and scientific tools are systematic instruments that we use to study the world and extend our ability to observe, measure and analyse, and are general-purpose. The new methods-driven discovery theory is thus straightforward: not only does it explain our past breakthroughs, it improves predicting future ones. When we invent, upgrade, combine or adopt a new method or tool, we can predict where discoveries can come from next, and when. It is about tracking the speed and direction of method innovations: this enables us to spot strong signals that discovery is soon to follow. The signal can come from a recently invented computational method, an upgraded particle accelerator, an advanced spectrometer combined with AI-tools, or a new experimental method adopted from another field. Each helps us anticipate where the frontiers of science can soon move . So the theory enables prediction: if a major new method or tool is developed, then the likelihood of new discoveries rises sharply. The theory predicts that making a major tool innovation sharply increases the odds of sparking major scientific advances—and more than other factors across science. We directly tested the theory across fields and history, finding strong and consistent evidence (Chapters 1–5). It is assumed in the discovery process that supporting factors—including our cognitive abilities and a minimal level of funding and collaboration—are in place to generate needed tools and research.