Ever wonder why cars were once called “horseless carriages”? There’s solid psychological grounding for such seemingly retrograde naming conventions. It has to do with a tendency to reject anything uncomfortably novel. As The Atlantic’s Senior Editor, Derek Thompson, describes in his engaging book about the nature of what it takes to make a hit (Hit Makers: How to Succeed in an Age of Distraction):

“In 2014, a team of researchers from Harvard University and Northeastern University wanted to know exactly what sort of proposals were most likely to win funding from prestigious institutions, like the National Institutes of Health — safely familiar proposals or extremely creative ones? They prepared about 150 research proposals and gave each one a novelty score. Then they recruited 142 world-class scientists to evaluate each project.

“The most novel proposals got the worst ratings. ‘Everyone dislikes novelty,’ lead author Karim Lakhani explained to me, and ‘experts tend to be over critical of proposals in their own domain.’ Extremely familiar proposals fared a little bit better, but they also received lower scores. The highest evaluation scores went to submissions that were deemed slightly new. There is an ‘optimal newness’ for ideas Lakhani said — advanced yet acceptable…

“This appetite for ‘optimal newness’ runs throughout the hit-making world. Film producers, like NIH scientists, have to evaluate hundreds of projects a year but can except only a tiny percentage. To grab their attention, writers often frame original ideas as a fresh combination of two familiar successes using a high concept pitch – like, ‘It's Romeo and Juliet on a sinking ship!’ (Titanic) or ‘It's Toy Story with talking animals!’ (The Secret Life of Pets). In Silicon Valley, where venture capitalists also sift through a surfeit of proposals, high concept pitches are so common that they are practically a joke. The home rental company Airbnb was once called ‘eBay for homes.’ The on-demand car service companies Uber and Lyft were once considered ‘Airbnb for cars.’ When Uber took off, new start-ups took to branding themselves ‘Uber for…’ anything…”

Thompson’s recommendation?

“The trick is learning to frame your new ideas as tweaks of old ideas, to mix a little fluency with a little disfluency – to make your audience see the familiarity behind the surprise.”

So not only is it true that new ideas are really combinations of existing parts, it’s also true that perhaps the best way to get traction on a new idea is to frame it in terms of the parts it’s built from.

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