This chapter traces the enduring influence of Graham Wallas (1926) five-stage model of creative thinking—preparation, incubation, intimation, illumination, and verification—on contemporary creativity research. While acknowledging Wallas’s contribution to recognizing unconscious processes in creative thinking, the chapter argues that his framework has inadvertently promoted what Latour terms a “diffusion model” of ideas, wherein initial conception is cast as the crucial creative act while material realization is dismissed as uninspired drudgery. This perspective has encouraged generations of researchers to focus on ideation ground zero, namely the moment when new ideas emerge in consciousness, rather than examining the extended processes through which ideas develop through material engagement. The chapter demonstrates how Wallas’s cognitive framework continues to shape methodologies that privilege mental processes over embodied action, perpetuating explanatory approaches that take loans on intelligence rather than documenting the actual work of creative discovery.