Here is an excerpt from an article written by Bronwyn Fryer for the Harvard Business Review blog. To read the complete article, check out the wealth of free resources, and sign up for a subscription to HBR email alerts, please click here.

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It’s become pretty much common knowledge that great innovation springs from the ability to pull two unlike things together to create a beautiful third. Steve Jobs famously shifted a paradigm when he fused calligraphy with technology to create the Mac’s graphical user interface. Many great inventions fuse something very simple, cheap and widely accessible — say, a small piece of paper — with something expensive and complex — say, a medical laboratory test — to come up with a marvelous solution, such as George Whitesides’postage-stamp sized diagnostic tool.

And though not always disruptive, many innovations spring from the fusion of business models. Consider Rent the Runway a mashup of high-end fashion and Netflix-style rental scheme. Sometimes a fusion of two ordinary objects creates an interesting, if not necessarily beautiful, third: Kristen Murdock makes cowpie clocks from dried, varnished cowpies and, well, clocks. Apparently they’re selling like hot … pies.

As Hal Gregerson and Jeffrey Dyer, authors of The Innovator’s DNA, have observed, the ability to associate unlike ideas is fundamental to innovation: “Overall, associating is the key [innovative] skill because new ideas aren’t created without connecting problems or ideas in ways that they haven’t been connected before.” But I wonder — why is it so difficult for companies to hire and promote people who are good at associative thinking?

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To read the complete article, please click here.

Bronwyn Fryer is a contributing editor to HBR.org.