Original ideas seem to be thin on the ground. Politicians reuse their predecessors’ policies. Television schedules are packed with the same old reality shows and police procedurals. And in fashion, retro rules, with designers currently channelling Eighties naff. It seems there is a fine line between inspiration and imitation.
So what does that mean to us in the world of work? Is it possible to have a brilliant, totally original idea that will change the world — or even a mildly inspirational notion that would brighten up a Monday morning? How can you be sure you aren’t drawing on the finite pool of ideas that people have already had?
First, the bad news. You can’t. “There is a tendency to think that you can just pluck an idea out of the air, but often it’s a question of the brain processing information that we have been picking up at an unconscious level,” says business psychologist Gary Fitzgibbon.
“We put the information together, and have an ‘idea’. We can’t know that it is someone else’s idea, and this can lead to unconscious plagiarism, which can land people in court.”
It’s a murky area. Sometimes “inspiration” strikes after years of study — and what looks like a startling innovation can turn out to be almost identical to an earlier piece of work.
This seems to be the case with 19th- century German scientist Friedrich August Kekule, the alleged “father of organic chemistry”. After a long period of research, Kekule made an amazing discovery about molecular structure: the “benzene ring”, which explained how carbon atoms can bond to as many as four other atoms at the same time. His “eureka” moment came to him in the form of a dream about a snake. But by the early 1920s his own biographer had reached the conclusion that his understanding was actually based on the work of two other scientists.
For deliberate plagiarism, punishment can be severe. One recent example is author Kaavya Viswanathan, who was unceremoniously dropped by her publisher Little, Brown and Co when it was found that her much-hyped first novel, How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild and Got a Life, was reported to contain plagiarised passages from at least five other novels.
The good news is that while plagiarism is a no-no, collaboration and novel applications of existing ideas are just fine. In fact, this is how most creative innovations come about. There is a clear difference between knowingly copying down great chunks of someone else’s work, and synthesising and reapplying existing knowledge in a creative way.
For Nick Temple, director of the Global Ideas Bank, a repository for thousands of ideas about society sent in by people all over the world, the very idea of “owning” an idea is missing the point. “There is no copyright in ideas, and we encourage people to see ideas as social resource,” he says. “Anyone can use these ideas, or add theirs to someone else’s.”
So far the bank has received more than 6 000 ideas, has 8 000 registered users and about 50 new suggestions come in each week. Plagiarism is not an issue.
According to Chris Barez-Brown, author of How to Have Kick-Ass Ideas (Harper-Collins), there is no need to get hung up on the idea of originality. “There is creativity in applying an idea which works in one field to another. Making it work for you is a real creative act — no one will have done it this way before.”
And if you want to apply lateral thinking to your working life, inspiration is the key. Barez-Brown advocates getting out of your familiar routine.
“We all like to be efficient, and we all like the comfort of familiar things, so we don’t always try new experiences,” he says. “The trouble with this is that we desensitise ourselves. To be creative, you need to get a new perspective — maybe something as simple as borrowing someone else’s Ipod and listening to their music for a change.” — Â