Trial and error
Thomas Edison wasn’t interested in theory, using instead a painstaking method of trial and error. An example is his perfection of the light bulb. Numerous individuals had worked on the light bulb in the past, but the major stumbling block had been the short lifespan of the filaments. Over the course of 1878-79 Edison and his staff tested literally thousands of different substances as filaments and sent men all over the world to try to find better materials. On October 21-22, 1879, he carbonized a piece of sewing thread to form a filament. It burnt 13.5 hours – a huge breakthrough. Changing the shape of the filament to a horseshoe increased the life span to over 100 hours. Through trial and error Edison and his colleagues had invented a practical light bulb, paving the way for the establishment of the electrical power system.
From http://www.ushistory.net/toc/electricity.html

Great ideas have three key elements
All big ideas share at least one of three business objectives: improved efficiency, greater effectiveness, or innovations in products or processes. In a way, it’s an exhaustive set of possibilities. You do things right, you do the right thing, or you do something new.
From “Hidden Asset,” by Bill Breen, Fast Company, March 2004
http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/80/davenport.htmlA drive to fly
In perfecting a heavier-than-air flying aircraft and revolutionizing transport in the process the Wright brothers, Wilbur and Orville, made numerous errors and created hundreds of failed prototypes. Yet they kept pushing and innovating and eventually made history on Kitty Hawk beach December 17, 1903. Here’s how they did it.
Research
First, the Wright brothers performed a literature search to find out the state of aeronautical knowledge at the time. They wrote to the Smithsonian and obtained technical papers regarding aerodynamics. They read about the works of Cayley and Langley and the hang-gliding flights of Otto Lilienthal.
Idea generation
Soon they (correctly) realized that control of the flying aircraft would be the most crucial and hardest problem to solve. They observed large gliding birds and started putting down some ideas about roll, pitch, and yaw.
Testing
They tested their ideas on a series of unpowered aircraft between 1900 and 1902, but these early kite and glider experiments failed to meet the brothers’ performance goals. So they built a wind tunnel and tested over two hundred different wings and airfoil models to improve performance. Their very successful 1902 aircraft was based on the new data and led directly to the historical 1903 run at Kitty Hawk.
Nonstop improvements
While the design of the airframe of the Wright aircraft remained nearly the same for years, the brothers continually improved and upgraded their engine design. Between 1903 and 1913 the engine power increased from 12 horsepower to nearly 75 horsepower.
They moved their flight testing from Kitty Hawk to their home town of Dayton, Ohio, and flew their new aircraft at Huffman’s Field on the edge of town. With new, more powerful aircraft, they were able to stay aloft for up to a half hour, fly figure eights, and even take passengers up for a ride. The age of the airplane had arrived.
From http://www.grc.nasa.gov/WWW/Wright/overview.htm