Chapter 2 The Key is in the Reading Finding a Project

Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes has an infamous method of creative reasoning that generates the ideas with which he solves the unsolvable. Ideas can be groundbreaking and positive but can be equally destructive if they are not understood, framed and appropriately applied. Luckily for his clients (and unluckily for the criminals), Sherlock Holmes is not only a master-generator of ideas, but has supreme control of his ‘mind palace’ in which his ideas are framed, judged and contextualised. The following chapter leads you through where ideas come from, how they can be moulded to attend to a problem space, how they are framed appropriately and ultimately how they can underpin a solid and realistic research proposal.