Coming up with original ideas is very important in higher order thinking.
Some ideas come from thoughts called insight.
An insight is like a light bulb turning on in your head. Insights are great thoughts that help you to see or understand something, quite often something that you have not been able to figure out before. For example, a student may have been having trouble getting all of his homework done at night. Usually he leaves his math homework until last because he doesn't like math and it is hard for him. Suddenly, he figures out that if he did his hardest subject first, the rest of the homework won't seem so bad, and he might actually finish it all.