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

In a book poised to become the bible of innovation, a renowned creativity expert reveals the key to the creative process-”borrowing.”

As a former aerospace scientist, Fortune 500 executive, chief innovation officer of two major companies, inventor and software entrepreneur, David Murray has made a living by coming up with new and innovative ideas. In Borrowing Brilliance he explains the origins and evolution of a business idea by showing readers how new ideas are merely the combinations of existing ideas. Since brilliance is actually borrowed, it’s easily within reach. It’s really a matter of knowing where to borrow the materials and how to put them together that determines creative ability. Murray presents a simple Six-Step process that anyone can use to build business innovation:

Step One: Defining-Define the problem you’re trying to solve.

Step Two: Borrowing-Borrow ideas from places with a similar problem.

Step Three: Combining-Connect and combine these borrowed ideas.

Step Four: Incubating-Allow the combinations to incubate into a solution.

Step Five: Judging-Identify the strength and weakness of the solution.

Step Six: Enhancing-Eliminate the weak points while enhancing the strong ones.

Each chapter features real-life examples of brilliant borrowers, including profiles of Larry Page and Sergey Brin (the Google guys), Bill Gates, George Lucas, Steve Jobs, Albert Einstein, and other creative thinkers. Murray used these methods to re-create his own career and he shows how you can harness them to find your own creative solutions. First you copy, then you create. And the further from your own company you look, the more creative the solution.

In the new bible of business innovation, renowned creativity expert David Kord Murray reveals the key to the creative process: borrowing. There is no such thing as a truly original idea. Great thinkers throughout history have understood this and used it to their advantage. Bill Gates -borrowed brilliance, to create Microsoft, Steve Jobs -borrowed to create the Mac, and long before that Sir Isaac Newton used similar thinking techniques to arrive at his theory of gravity. Borrowing Brilliance is challenges our notions of intellectual property and authorship, explores the evolution of a creative idea, and takes us step-by-step through Murray’s own unique thought process, which combines analytical and non-traditional thinking techniques. Murray’s six step “borrowing” process is one that anyone can master to build business innovation.

Murray combines practical lessons with stories from his own career, as well as the careers of brilliant borrowers past and present. Most people believe creativity is a gift, that it can’t be taught, that it’s innate in your thinking process and either you have it or you don’t. But Murray lifts the veil off the creative process, bringing it from the shadows of the subconscious mind into the conscious world. Creativity is not the result of divine intervention; it is something that can be learned and it is easily within reach.