All creativity is simply a reworking of existing ideas. In the art world this process is called influence. Matisse influenced Picasso; Marlowe influenced Shakespeare. As Aaron Sorkin once put it – ‘good writers borrow from other writers, great writers steal from them outright.’ This, in itself, was influenced by T.S. Elliot (‘immature poets imitate, mature poets steal’).
Such influencing is not confined to the art world. Many successful businesses simply improve upon existing ideas in the market place. Apple’s groundbreaking Lisa computer was influenced by work on graphic user interfaces at Xerox. Lou Gerstner implemented successful strategies from his time at American Express to turn round the fortunes of IBM in the ‘90’s. Google – a company many credit as being a cauldron of creativity – was founded through a re-combination of Alta Vista’s search engine and the long-standing process of academic referencing. Even their P-P-C business model was taken wholesale from Overture Inc.
In the words of Steve Jobs: ‘creativity is just connecting things.’
Why is it then that researchers seem set on reinventing the wheel at every opportunity? Rather than building, learning and enriching the existing information which lies unused and unnoticed on a company’s hard drive or reference shelf, fresh projects are commissioned. Many of which produce the same findings already harboured within the bowels of the organisation.
There seems to be a resistance to using existing information for new purposes, an underlying feeling that the real solution lies outside the company if only it could be found by the right agency – that maximising the existing knowledge is inadequate.
Such thinking is faulty. Fresh insights comes through creative combination, by bringing past research together in a new and useful way. This does not diminish the power of the new finding, the new combination is unique because the insight is unique. But the elements that make up the combination are not unique at all.
As an industry we should be less focussed on naively and dogmatically commissioning ream upon ream of data. Instead we should take the time to realise the power of the existing data in our possession. This is an approach reflected in William Duggan’s recent book Strategic Intuition. Duggan highlights the benefits of reflecting on the past to achieve that ‘coup d’oeil’ – literally ‘the stroke of the eye’; the knowing insight – into what will work in the current situation. Gaining such insight is relatively simple, but it requires the right presence of mind, and a willingness to reflect on existing information, as opposed to largely ignoring what went before.
Of course, this demands that companies already have an existing reservoir of research on which to build; but in many cases this is true. So, before breaking the bank on the next big project, it may be better, on occasions, for companies to look within first.
Patrick Young
Tags: Aaron Sorkin, Apple, coup d'oeil, DVL Smith, Google, knowledge maximiser, Lou Gerstner, Overture Inc, Patrick Young, Picasso, Shakespeare, steve jobs, strategic intuition, T.S. Elliot, william duggan