While "thinking outside the box" can be an over-used phase at times, in the world of grants it can provide the genesis of ideas. The "box" is the world of academia accepted by most educators, while "thinking outside" is the process that leads to grant ideas. In the grant world, "thinking outside the box" is a process of doing something that has not been done before or of improving something that has been done before. That something may be as small as using inexpensive toy cars to better explain ratios and proportions or as large as creating an expensive national center for nanotechnology.