Science education in the United Kingdom faces a dual challenge in the near future: that of addressing increasing disaffection from the subject by pupils as they enter adolescence coupled with the downturn in learning as they leave primary school behind. Both bridging work and teacher creativity have been identified as key ingredients in ensuring pupil engagement in learning, yet innovation requires both time and a broader vision than may be offered by a normative and centralized pedagogy. This paper proposes a four-stage model for curriculum development to encourage creativity, based on the experiences of teachers as they designed bridging work for pupils in science. A grounded theory approach is utilized to generate four concept categories emerging from participants' comments during the study. These are described as "uncertainty", "visioning", "realization" and "readiness", and this research demonstrates that "bottom-up" is a very effective method of professional development promoting combinatorial thinking and creative science teaching. (Contains 2 figures.)