How to Change the World … Amazing Results To Shoot For

Our agency focuses on creativity and innovation among a few other topics. From time to time we’ll post interesting tidbits on creative thinking in general. Occasionally a few on how to change the world by business adaptation and change.

What we see depends on what we are looking for.

As background, my perspective on creativity is very simple.

It is not about invention. Rather it is about collecting and connecting dots — bringing together two (or more) ideas to create an altogether new idea.

Related post: Learn How to Think What No One Else Thinks

We often think of innovation as inventing new things, but we may be smarter to think of it as recombining old ones. The truth is that important breakthroughs usually come from combining ideas from different domains. Often combining very different, sometimes weird ideas.

One famous historical example is that of the discovery of genetics. In 1865, when Gregor Mendel published his groundbreaking study of the inheritance of characteristics in pea plants, it went nowhere. It took nearly a half-century before the concept was combined with Darwin’s ideas on natural selection to unleash a torrent of innovations in medicine and science.

A more recent example is the Apple ecosystem. There were plenty of digital music players around when Steve Jobs and Apple launched the iPod. Note he also combined his player with iTunes, which made…