Your writting reads like a book.
It is simple genius when a nautical mechanic can gerry rig a fix at sea without a true replacement part. We used to refer to Yankee ingenuity but now Silicon valley is publicly leading apparent innovation while most genius leaps are actually being made in bio tech imo.

Thinking outside the hypercube can result in a lucky guess or a vision. Practice in this kind of non traditional thinking is helpful but without real genius it will lead to many gross mistakes or a one trick pony genius. Those who are seldom wrong are the genius' we need.

Pure research as opposed to goal oriented projects will attract genius' of different talents. To recognize who that one or two genius people are out of billions is not always obvious. I'm thinking of last century's Indian mathmatician who was brought to Cambridge.

DMcG thinks its best to look among the young grad student for the genius. Old folks are not in the running I guess.

BILL I bet you can carve a mobius strip out of wood, but you coudn't carve a Klien bottle, and if you could half of it would be hidden.