SUMMARIES.COM is a concentrated business information service. Every week, subscribers are e-mailed a concise summary of a different business book. Each summary is about 8 pages long and contains the stripped-down essential ideas from the entire book in a time-saving format. By investing less than one hour per week in these summaries, subscribers gain a working knowledge of the top business titles. Subscriptions are available on a monthly or yearly basis. Further information is available at www.summaries.com.
All rights reserved for all countries.
© Summaries.com
www.summaries.com
Powered by Primento
The digital partner of traditional publishers
ISBN: 978-280622-2695
MAIN IDEA
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.
The first three steps can be termed as the origin of the creative idea:
The last three steps are where you then evolve and polish your new idea to make it workable:
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. This has been so throughout human history. Some of the most creative people who have ever lived, such as Isaac Newton and William Shakespeare, were accused of idea theft and plagiarism. Ideas, like species, naturally evolve over time. Existing concepts are altered and combined to construct new concepts; the way geometry, trigonometry, and algebra combine to form calculus. 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.”
– Dave Murray
DAVID MURRAY is an aerospace engineer turned entrepreneur, inventor and Fortune 500 executive. He has served as the head of innovation for Intuit and other Fortune 500 companies. Mr. Murray has also started several companies from scratch and grown them to millions in revenues. He has worked as the Senior Manager for Advanced Technologies for President Reagan’s Star Wars program, as a representative for McDonnell Douglas Astronautics Company and as part of the conceptual development team for the International Space Station.
The Web site for this book is at www.BorrowingBrilliance.com.
This is a summary and not a critique or a review of the book. It does not offer judgment or opinion on the content of the book. This summary may not be organized chapter-wise but is an overview of the main ideas, viewpoints and arguments from the book as a whole. This means that the organization of this summary is not a representation of the book.
Creative ideas are always the solutions to problems. Therefore, how you define the problem at hand shapes what kind of solution emerges. Don’t be too narrow or too broad.
“A problem is the foundation of a creative idea. In other words, a creative idea is built upon the problem one is trying to solve. It’s the starting point. Build upon a foundation of sand and your idea will collapse. Build upon solid ground and your idea is much more likely to be realized. Solid ground is achieved by taking the time to study your problem.”
– David Murray
The first step in coming up with a creative idea is always to study the problem at hand. There are two issues which make studying and analyzing problems accurately a challenge: