Better solutions sometimes appear when we stop pushing through the obvious route.
More quotesOriginality is frequently theft with a long enough journey home.
The folding mechanism already existed under a Spitfire. The cyclone already worked in a sawmill. A spiral ramp was mundane in a car park and startling inside a gallery. The creative act was not inventing the component from divine mist; it was spotting that two apparently different problems shared a skeleton.
Competitor research rarely produces this leap because competitors inherit the same assumptions. Ten software teams study one another and emerge with eleven left-hand navigation bars. Another field offers a working mechanism without the category’s habits attached. Games know how to make progress visible. Hotels know how to recover after disappointment. Logistics knows where uncertainty becomes expensive. The point is not to paste cartoon badges onto enterprise software. That is costume theft. Borrow the principle and rebuild it for the new risk, audience and setting.
Every brief deserves one impolite question: who has already solved this somewhere we would never normally look? If the answer is another direct rival, the search has barely begun.
“Not invented here” is usually praised as prudence by people preparing to invent something worse here. A borrowed idea still needs judgement and adaptation. It does not need the vanity of being born in the room.