This work offers a summary of the book "BORROWING BRILLIANCE: The Six Steps to Business Innovation By Building on the Ideas of Others" by David Kord Murray.
David Murray is an aerospace engineer turned entrepreneur, inventor and Fortune 500 executive. He has notably served as the head of innovation for Intuit and other Fortune 500 companies and has worked as the Senior Manager for Advanced Technologies for President Reagan’s Star Wars program.
In Borrowing Brilliance, Murray argues that new ideas are always constructed out of existing ideas. What appear to be genuinely original ideas always combine snippets of one idea with parts of another to come up with something which has never before been combined in that way.
To be specific, when you look at the creative process from a big picture perspective, you’ll always find the genesis of any new idea comes through a six-step process. By working through this six-step process, you come up with something new which combines aspects or elements of old and established ideas into a different mix.
"Brilliance is actually borrowed, easily within your reach, for, really, it’s knowing where to borrow the materials from and how to put them together that determines your creative ability."