(Business 2.0 Magazine) -- We're rumbling across eastern Colombia in a convoy of military jeeps and pickup trucks. Salsa music blasts out of speakers somewhere, and an unrelenting 100-degree sun is bleaching the bone-dry savanna. Although there's not a plane in the sky or a living thing on the ground for miles around, our convoy is armed to the teeth.

Commandos in fatigues and flak jackets ride shotgun - with M-4 machine guns dangling from their shoulders and automatic pistols strapped above their right knees. One soldier is perched in a turret with a 7.72-mm machine gun. Another mans an MK-19 grenade launcher.

This rolling armada of arms and men has been seconded for a business mission from a military base near Colombia's eastern border that forms a front against the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) - the main opposition in a narco-insurgency that has made this drug-ridden country one of the most feared destinations on the planet. The base doubles as a sentry for a nearby U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration radar station that tracks smugglers flying loads of cocaine to transshipment points in Venezuela, just a few miles away.

But it's the human capital our convoy carries, not cocaine, that has brought out the big guns today: two men whom an Army general sitting near me describes as holding the future of Colombia - if not the world - in their hands. And our destination is not a Venezuelan drug drop, but the site of an economic miracle in the making called Gaviotas II.

Odd couple: Pauli and Lugari promote Gaviotas's inventions through an R&D center in Bogota.

 

Father of Invention

Paolo Lugari's 7 secrets for creating creativity.

1. Ban brainstorming meetings: Creativity is spontaneous. Formal meetings are a poor forum for creation. People choke because they show up for a limited time with a narrow agenda. Turn every workday into a continuous, open-ended brainstorming session.

2. Practice da Vinci's code: When your organization tackles a problem or a project, wipe the board clean of all assumptions and prior knowledge. "Leonardo da Vinci expressed it best," Lugari says. "Step one is a tabula rasa."

3. Play nice with others: At Gaviotas, new technologies grow out of a process of tweaks and upgrades, with a variety of contributors adding their own nuts and bolts. "These inventions came out of spontaneous, collective thinking," Lugari says. "We don't like prima donnas."

4. Burn the corporate policy manual: To think freely, you have to act freely. A fanatical dedication to free speech - unencumbered by top-down prohibitions - has produced a Gaviotas mind-set in which unproductive behavior melts away of its own accord.

5. Rule out "degree-itis": There is no hierarchy based on titles; a peasant worker gets the same hearing as a Ph.D. One of the most important revenue streams at Gaviotas - the production of industrial coatings and resins from pine pitch - evolved from an observation made by one of the cooks.

6. Master the art of indiscipline: Big breakthroughs are often the result of people crossing disciplines. Mendel was a priest before he was a biologist; the fuel cell was invented by a lawyer. So rotate your specialists out of their specialties and promote generalists ahead of narrowly focused experts.

7. Trash your Outlook calendar: Give up time-management tricks and devote each hour of every workday to whatever task or inspiration arises spontaneously. If you keep filling your week with scheduled meetings and tasks, you'll snuff out your creative sparks before they have a chance to fly.

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