The way options are arranged changes what people notice and choose.
More quotesOriginality is an overrated alibi for having no references. The blank page does not want your pure, unprecedented genius. It wants ingredients. A chef does not invent salt, heat and carrots before lunch; they arrange familiar things into a result worth eating.
So does everyone else. Software borrows progress bars from games. Loyalty schemes borrow levels and status. Digital onboarding borrows the rituals of hospitality: arrival, reassurance, one obvious next move. A product can feel new because its component ideas travelled far enough to avoid meeting in the competitor’s deck.
Copying one fashionable company is not synthesis. It is karaoke. The better question is not “What has nobody in history done?” That is usually impossible to prove and creatively useless. Ask what works in another world that this category has ignored. What might a bank learn from a theme park about queues? What might enterprise software steal from cookbooks about sequencing? What could a hospital learn from airports about finding the next step? These are prompts, not claims that every metaphor survives contact.
A wide diet creates more unlikely collisions. Read outside marketing. Notice packaging, station entrances, supermarket signs, repair manuals and the peculiar way a good pub handles regulars. Most fragments will sit unused for years. Fine. A cupboard containing only the ingredients needed for tonight’s recipe is called a meal kit, not an imagination.
Taste still matters. Arrangement is creative precisely because selection is hard. The lightning bolt is mostly editing with dramatic timing.