If there are no new ideas, how do we keep innovating?

IN 1903, Mark Twain wrote a letter to Helen Keller. She had been accused of plagiarism. Twain consoled her, writing that “substantially all ideas are second-hand, consciously or unconsciously drawn from a million outside sources”. He went on: “It takes a thousand men to invent a telegraph or a steam engine, or a phonograph, or a telephone, or any other important thing – and the last man gets the credit and we forget the others. He added his little mite – that 99 parts of all things that proceed from the intellect are plagiarisms, pure and simple.” The whole, glorious passage is here.

Now comes a book by Sheena Iyengar, who is herself blind, that I’m tempted to call original, except that she (like Twain) would undoubtedly insist that there’s nothing new under the sun. In Think Bigger: How to Innovate, Iyengar writes that thinking bigger is about assembling old ideas in a new way. Sounding much like Twain in 1903, she writes that all successful innovators are “strategic copiers”, who learnt “from examples of success, extracted the parts that worked well, imagined new ways of using those pieces, and combined them to create something new and meaningful”.

There’s a fable that Isaac Newton, one of history’s greatest scientists, thought of the theory of gravity in a flash when an apple fell on his head. In reality, Newton built on the work of the Scottish mathematician David Gregory, the Belgian mathematician Rene-Francois Walter de Sluse and the German astronomer Johannes Kepler, among others. Newton explained his method of innovation when he wrote in 1675: “If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.”