Tom Kelley is the general manager of IDEO, a leading design and innovation firm, and the author of The 10 Faces of Innovation, rated among Business Week's best books on the subject.

Tom Kelley can't imagine a world of creative thinkers without a world of readers. Reading, he says, "is the cornerstone of thought," the spark that ignites an intellect of curiosity. The foundation, in other words, of creativity. And it's something that can start early in life.

To help ensure that his two young children would not simply master reading but thrive on it, Tom and his wife read to them every day until they were of an age where they could pick up the book themselves, which they now do with enthusiasm.

A writer of nonfiction, Tom now finds this genre the most effective in nurturing his creative process. But it still must be entertaining, books that can win a busy thinker's attention in our stimuli-saturated world, and prod that intellectual curiosity.

"I'm interested in writers with new points of view about the human brain (like Malcolm Gladwell's Blink, Daniel Pink's A Whole New Mind, Guy Claxton's Hare Brain, Tortoise Mind). I love business writers whose energy leaps off the page, like Tom Peters, Seth Godin or Bob Sutton. And I really enjoy deep thinkers who present a new framework for viewing the world, like Clayton Christensen in The Innovator's Solution and Steven Levitt in Freakonomics."

Having an idea is one thing; holding onto it is another. The trick is to be able to capture it in all its fresh, raw, sunburst of creativity before, as Tom says, "it "gets swept out of your brain through the merciless deletion process of short-term memory."

His solution is an idea wallet: a simple folded card that lives in his back right pocket, ready at any moment to be the tabula rasa of those insights that come in a flash and often disappear just as quickly.

"Not daydreams exactly, but flashes of insight otherwise quickly forgotten. The ideas can be of any kind: small observations about things not quite right with the world, fresh metaphors that shed new light on an old problem, inventions I wish someone would make, etc. I just keep a running list, and then every once in a while, I "harvest' the ideas for use in a conversation, a client project, even a book."

For Tom, the amount of creative output he generates directly correlates to the number of times he pulls his idea wallet out of his back pocket.

"I genuinely believe that keeping an idea wallet can make you a more creative person. Even if it doesn't increase your rate of creative idea generation (which eventually it will), it increases the percentage of those ideas that you can save and use later. So the idea wallet effectively increases your creative output. Who wouldn't want that?"

Perhaps the worst thing to do to a captured idea is to hold it hostage. Once installed in the brain, it needs to be released into a larger universe so that it can begin to take hold elsewhere. Tom sometimes uses mind-mapping to develop an idea. If it relates to a book he's writing, he'll transfer the idea to a notebook—just one idea per page, so that there's room to later expand on it . Friends and associates often serve as the alpha test phase.

"All of these techniques give your unconscious mind some time to work on the idea in background for a while, which can often lead to fresh approaches."

Time of day and frame of mind play important roles in engendering Tom's creative thinking. Since Tom is at his best in the morning, he uses this time for the creative work and saves other parts of his day for more routine tasks. And he appreciates the value of the almost-lost art of daydreaming.

"Today the opportunity to talk on the mobile phone is so tangible—while the value of daydreaming seems so intangible—that most of us would be tempted to squander that creative opportunity on routine conversations. Talk to almost anyone who travels a lot, and you'll eventually hear them use the expression ’airplane time,' referring to those hours of enforced cessation where you have little or no access to things like phone calls, email, and meetings that occupy our brains most of the day. For super-busy people, plane time is a rare chance to think, and read, and plan uninterrupted. I know that technology will soon make it possible for us to stay fully connected while in the air—but meanwhile, I will try to enjoy and get value from airplane time while it lasts."

Einstein said, "Imagination is more important than knowledge." Agreed, says Tom, in large part because of the Internet age.

"Knowledge—in the narrow sense of the word—is slightly overrated in a world with Google at our fingertips. Storing large volumes of raw data in our brains seems of declining value if I can look it up in less than 30 seconds. Insight is valuable, wisdom is valuable, but data has become a readily accessible commodity. I would rather kids finish school with the imagination to be a creative storyteller than a perfect memory of who was president after Millard Fillmore."

Tom has his own favorite quotes about creative thinking. One, by Soichiro Honda, is "Success is 99% failure." The other, which belongs to Baudelaire, is "Genius is childhood recalled at will."

And it helps if there's an idea wallet in your back pocket to help you record it.

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