David Kord Murray

David Kord Murray is a former aerospace scientist, Fortune 500 executive, chief innovation officer of two major companies, inventor and software entrepreneur. He has made a living by coming up with new and innovative ideas. In Borrowing Brilliance, he explains the origins and evolution of a business idea by showing readers how new ideas are merely the combinations of existing ideas.

Since brilliance is actually borrowed, it’s easily within reach. It’s really a matter of knowing where to borrow the materials and how to put them together that determines creative ability. Murray presents a simple Six-Step process that anyone can use to build business innovation:

Step One: Defining—Define the problem you’re trying to solve.
Step Two: Borrowing—Borrow ideas from places with a similar problem.
Step Three: Combining—Connect and combine these borrowed ideas.
Step Four: Incubating—Allow the combinations to incubate into a solution.
Step Five: Judging—Identify the strength and weakness of the solution.
Step Six: Enhancing—Eliminate the weak points while enhancing the strong ones.

Each chapter features real-life examples of brilliant borrowers, including profiles of Larry Page and Sergey Brin (the Google guys), Bill Gates, George Lucas, Steve Jobs, Albert Einstein, and other creative thinkers.

Here is what he has to say about Walt Disney’s “borrowing” from various sources while planning and designing Disneyland:

“In addition to his movie borrowings, he also borrowed from museums, parks, and city planners. His nightly fireworks show and careful attention to cleanliness were not borrowed from movies but from Tivoli Gardens in Denmark. The inspiration for the Matterhorn roller coaster wasn’t from a film but from a personal trip he took to Zermat with his wife and daughter. The steam engine that circles the park was borrowed directly from the one that circled electric Park in Kansas City where he grew up.”

It would be a mistake to think of innovation only in terms of a single improvement (i.e. “a better mousetrap”). As Disney and countless others remind us, is a mindset for a process that can “borrow” from a wide and deep range of sources, with the only limits being self-imposed.

To paraphrase René Descartes, “If I can imagine it, it’s possible.”