Innovation or plagiarism?
According to David Kord Murray, borrowing is at the heart of creativity and innovation—borrowing the ideas of those that have been there before. So when does borrowing become stealing? When does creativity become plagiarism? To explore both sides of the argument, you could try asking Oracle and Google, but their answers will most certainly differ.
When Oracle bought Sun Microsystems in April 2009, with it came ownership of the Java programming language. Now Oracle has Google in the dock for allegedly stealing Java code for its Android operating system. So has Google borrowed to innovate, or has it infringed on Oracle's intellectual property? Whichever way it goes, money - large amounts of it - will likely change hands in the settlement.
In Borrowing Brilliance David Kord Murray uses examples from the computer industry and beyond to make his point: ideas don't materialize from a vacuum; to innovate you'll need to borrow. Who can deny that Bill Gates borrowed an operating system to create and package Microsoft's seminal offering to IBM; Google's founders borrowed from library science to develop their web search engine; and Charles Darwin borrowed concepts from Charles Lyell's theories in geology to conceive his theory of evolution? And his list of creative borrowers goes on: the Wright brothers, Walt Disney and George Lucas, Albert Einstein and John Nash, Mr Thomas Edison and Masaru Ibuka san—Murray fingers anyone who's anyone.
Innovation as process
But there's more to innovation than borrowing. Murray was Head of Innovation at software developer Intuit—a role that presupposed innovation can be planned—and in Borrowing Brilliance he reveals his methods. Borrowing is just part of the package: it becomes effective when it lives within a process that starts by clearly defining the problem to be solved (step one of his process). A well enunciated problem heightens our senses as we search for related ideas to borrow (step two) and then combine (step three) to create new, and hopefully innovative, solutions.
It's at the fourth step, incubating, where you'll need to conjure up some magic. Murray gives his chapter on step four the sub-title "the subconscious mind as the womb for a creative idea." His point is that, without the fodder harvested in steps one to three (defining, borrowing and combining), there's no fuel for the subconscious to digest and regurgitate—so there's little chance of a world-shattering "aha!"
Step five (judging) asks us to apply our critical skills to weighing up the alternatives in order to identify the best solution out of all the possible solutions we've created. Murray doesn't see much of a role for uncritical brainstorming in creative thinking. He prefers to have his judgment engaged most of the time, and especially at this point, before the ideas are released into the world at large.
Round the block again
It's a six-step process, but step six comprises a few more iterations through steps one to five to hone the final product—something Murray's book may have benefited from. His writing style is akin to fast food: it's appealing to the eye and taste buds, but the servings are a little large and not quite as nutritous as you may have hoped for. There's a smorgasbord of examples and anecdotes to wade through, including many personal incidents from the author's past. Each chapter begins with "Traveling back in time x years, I…" where "x" is a random number between two and 30. After a while the chronology becomes a little confusing and the relevance of the anecdotes problematic. More annoying is the occasional insertion of the phrases "Go figure, right?" and "Let me explain".
But let's not miss the contents for the wrapping. Murray's creative thinking process is a great reminder that creativity, as much as any other aspect of useful living, involves disciplined hard work. And he has some pertinent and telling examples and anecdotes. My favorite anecdote is the story of John F Kennedy's stroke of genius in crafting his first inaugural address. Kennedy remembered his headmaster's repeated exhortation at Choate prep school ("Ask not what Choate can do for you, but what you can do for Choate"). A minor word swap turned the banal into the brilliant.
What about plagiarism?
If we need to borrow to create, how do we avoid the charge of plagiarism? Murray quotes Einstein as saying: "The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources." It's as much a matter of perception as moral dilemma. The greater the distance between you and your source, the more likely you are to be considered a creative genius, and the less likely you are to be labelled a thief. Murray says: "there's a fine line between plagiarism and creativity, a line defined by the source of the theft." Solving new problems using your competitor's old software code may see you called "thief"; applying to biology concepts developed in geology attract the label "genius." Go figure, right?