Forget About “New Ideas”

“Is there anything of which one can say, ‘Look! This is something new’?
It was here already, long ago; it was here before our time.”
Ecclesiastes‬ ‭1:10‬ ‭NIV‬‬

Years ago Bob Sutton told our leadership class at Stanford that “there’s really no such thing as a new idea; only new combinations of old things, seeing old things in new ways.” He was addressing the students’ lingering self-consciousness that many of their “new” ideas weren’t technically, properly, new.

This is the nature of creativity. As Arthur Koestler put it, “Creativity is the collision of two apparently unrelated frames of reference.” Both frames existed, and the “new” idea is really just a collision, those frames’ baby, if you will.

Jeff Bezos valued this kind of thinking even very early in his life. As a high school senior, “After his greasy summer job at McDonald's, Bezos wanted to avoid another low-wage job, so with (his high school girlfriend, Ursula) Werner he created the DREAM Institute, a ten-day a summer school for ten-year-olds that explored such diverse topics as Gulliver’s Travels, black holes, nuclear deterrence, and the Bezos family’s Apple II computer. The class ‘emphasizes the use of new ways of thinking in old areas,’ according to a flyer the young teachers passed out to parents…” (Brad Stone, The Everything Store)

One interesting example of there being “no such thing as a new idea” is what are known as “multiples.” A multiple is a simultaneous but unrelated instance of discovery. It turns out, there are many more of these than you might imagine:

“In the early 1920s, two Columbia University scholars named William Ogburn in Dorothy Thomas decided to track down as many multiples as they could find, eventually publishing the survey in an influential essay with the delightful title ‘Are Inventions Inevitable?’ Ogburn and Thomas found 148 instances of independent innovation, most of them occurring within the same decade. Reading the list now one is struck not just by the sheer number of cases, but how indistinguishable the list is from an unfiltered history of big ideas. Multiples have been invoked to support hazy theories about the zeitgeist, but they have a much more grounded explanation. Good ideas are not conjured out of thin air; they are built out of a collection of existing parts, the composition of which expands (and, occasionally, contracts) over time. Some of these parts are conceptual: ways of solving problems, or new definitions of what constitutes a problem in the first place. Some of them are, literally, mechanical parts.” (Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From)

This is true at the neurological level as well. According to neuroscientist Morten Friis-Olivarius, “The underlying neural process of creativity is quite simple: it’s taking some things we already know and combining them in a new way. You have to realize that the brain is not capable of producing new material from scratch. We can only take what we have in our memory system and combine that in different fashions...”

What’s fascinating is, simply being aware of this — that “creativity is just connecting things,” as Steve Jobs said — has a profound impact on an individual’s creative output: researchers found that becoming aware of what’s happening neurologically increased divergent output by 30-70%!

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