To innovate is to come up with new things... The problem is that we tend to think of innovators in terms of academia... in people who are well educated, in those who are capable of abstract thinking. For someone who is starting to learn programming, you normally advise him/her to master the language before doing an actual assignment. Otherwise he/she is surely digging out his/her failure. I was amazed today with a colleague who hardly knows English, and barely knows programming, and he was assigned a real task that he has to deliver. The task would require knowledge of sophisticated programming (sorry for the jargon, but he neded to know XML and Arrays). He just managed to finish the task using a different logic. technically wise, what he came up with is very far from being a "good programming", but in terms of "finding a solution" within the given time, a solution that worked, that was great, given the very primitive basis he knows. A good lesson that I learned: "Try sometimes to deviate from the standard way of doing things" or least: "Let others deviate".