1. If you are writing material which means you need to world build, finding out how this world works/has worked/has made blunderingly colossial historical mistakes/created some fascinating engineering etc can directly inspire you for how your fictional world carries out these things. (Sometimes it can be the direct opposite of how we've done it but you need to know how we did it first to be able to do that!).
2. Ideas spark off other ideas and non-fiction is full of them. What did make an inventor come up with their revolutionary new designs? What made them come up with a new system for, say, transport when nobody else had realised a need for it? There are ideas for characters here too...
3. When anyone comes up with something new, there will be opposition. Sometimes it's justified, sometimes not. How does your hero/heroine overcome that? Or if they are the ones behind the opposition, do they achieve their objective?
Plenty of story triggers there!