“The cure for Apple is not cost-cutting. The cure for Apple is to innovate its way out of its current predicament.”
Steve Jobs
The innovation already exists
Steve Jobs was a strong advocate for innovation and the contribution a broad set of life experiences could make to creativity.
Jobs’s view is supported by Genrich Altshuller‘s research which found that:
- problems and solutions are repeated across industries and sciences
- patterns of technical evolution are also repeated across industries and sciences
- the innovations used scientific effects outside the field in which they were developed.
In other words, whether consciously or unconsciously, systematically or intuitively, the most fertile ground for innovation is repurposing ideas from other fields.
Perhaps it is unfair to characterize Jobs’s repurposing ideas from other fields as unconscious. Here he is with a possibly apocryphal quote attributed to Pablo Picasso:
“Good artists copy; great artists steal.”
Your turn
What can we copy, um steal, from Steve Jobs’s philosophy?
When faced with a problem that demands an innovative solution, the logical course is to look for solutions that have been applied elsewhere. The odds are greater that you will find a solution in novel application of ideas than in novel ideas themselves. This is what gives the 40 Principles their efficacy – they draw ideas from all industries and sciences to provide fodder for innovation.
