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

Finally! A useful book on the elusive topic of creativity with thoughts shared one can actually use. In addition, the author's personal stories of successes and failures in business and personal life are very enlightening and at times amusing. Whether a reader struggles with creativity or is a highly creative person, everyone can take useful ideas out of this read and apply them to their craft. A core topic Mr. Murray talks about is how taking ideas from others within your industry or closely related area is perceived as thievery aka plagiarism while taking ideas from more unrelated industries is called creative genius. This fact in and of itself is nonsensical and comical as the action is the exact same thing. The other core message relates to something also Albert Einstein has talked about when he said that creativity is essentially 'combinatory play'. Something new always has to come from something else. So, in essence, most if not all 'new' ideas are really just new combinations of already existing ones. The author puts some method to the madness by providing a step by step process for finding and then (re)combining materials to help the reader produce a problem-solving idea.