Borrowing Brilliance

I enjoyed the idea of this book and found it personally very inspiring. Dave Murray in “Borrowing Brilliance: The Six Steps to Business Innovation by Building on the Ideas of Others” claims that brilliance is borrowed. The author stresses upon ideas that can be made real, and to constructing something new out of other things because he believes that ideas are constructed out of other ideas and there are no truly original thoughts. According to him it’s impossible to build something out of nothing so you have to do it out of something else, thus brilliance is borrowed. Murray states that there are six steps in the process of innovation. Step one is defining a problem; how you define it will determine how you solve it, he claims. Step two is borrowing. Murray suggests that it is good to borrow ideas from individuals or organizations that have a problem similar to yours. Murray’s third step is combining. Connect and combine these borrowed ideas. According to Murray, making combinations is the essence of creativity. Step four is incubation. Allow the combinations to incubate into a solution. For example Bill Gates came up with the idea of Excel by stealing the original program from Lotus 1-2-3 and tried to make it better and easier to use, so Bill Gates took this software program and allowed it to evolve into something more useful for business applications and accounting. Step five is judging. In creative processes, more than one possible solution may arise so you would better identify the strength and weakness of the solution. The final step is enhancing. In the enhancement process, the author suggests eliminating the weak points while enhancing the strong ones. He basically wants to make us understand that ideas evolve through trial and error adjustments, so we must keep on trying various alternatives without being defeated by possible failures until we succeed.