Book Details

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

As a former aerospace scientist, Fortune 500 executive, chief innovation officer of two major companies, inventor and software entrepreneur, David Murray 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. Murray used these methods to re-create his own career and he shows how you can harness them to find your own creative solutions. First you copy, then you create. And the further from your own company you look, the more creative the solution.

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