Borrowing Brilliance: The Six Steps to Business Innovation by Building on the Ideas of Others

  • David Kord Murray | David Kord Murray

There is a fine line between theft and originality: the trick is the source of the borrowing. Borrow from your direct competitors and you are a thief, but cast a wider net and borrow beyond your field and you are considered creative. In fact that is “the creative paradox”: that copying and building on the insights of others is actually the source of creativity. Ideas, in fact, are free, and it wasn’t until the free market put a price on creative ideas that people started to claim possession of them, giving rise to signatures, trademarks, patents and copyrights. This resulted in a fog of misunderstanding about creativity that smothers creative thought, but we can lift the fog with a six step process:

  • Define the problem
  • Borrow ideas from places with similar problems
  • Connect and combine borrowed ideas
  • Allow combinations to incubate
  • Identify the strength and weakness of the solution
  • Eliminate weak points while enhancing strong ones.

Speaker Details

David Kord Murray began his career as an aerospace engineer working on the International Space Station, the MX Missile, the Delta Rocket and the Space Shuttle. He spent a year in the basement of the Pentagon, working on Pres. Reagan’s Star Wars program as Senior Manager for Advanced Technologies, and then went back to work in the private sector at McDonnell Douglas. He then moved into the entrepreneurial world, created and sold a variety of companies before becoming the Head of Innovation at Intuit, moved to Intuit where most of the research on this creative strategy was tested.The full schedule of upcoming talks in the Microsoft Research Visiting Speaker Series is available here: http://sharepoint/sites/visitingspeaker/default.aspx

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