What is the meaning of innovation today, and why is it important to “connect the dots” even when distant? To paraphrase Banksy (who quoted Pablo Picasso) “The good artists copy, the great artists steal”.
Today, this particular axiom is ubiquitous. Creativity is all about stealing and rearranging. To quote Austin Kleon, “no work is completely original, because everything derives from someone else’s work”. What matter is the ability to turn something “stolen” into something new. To paraphrase Henderson & Clark, it’s a matter of architectural abilities – knowing how to connect the distant dots, as explained by Steve Jobs during his famous speech at Stanford.
From the second Ghostbusters, to the third Back to the Future and the fourth Indiana Jones, and then again the fifth Rocky, the sixth Star Wars, the seventh Harry Potter and the eighth Batman until the twenty-third James Bond, and then we can get back with the prequel of Alien, X-Men, Spiderman and Terminator, or we can sink in the remake of Ocean’s Eleven, The Ladykillers, The Italian Job, King Kong, Psycho, The Next Three Days, Everybody’s Fine, War of the Worlds, The Planet of the Apes and Scarface, movies seem more and more a déjà vu that keeps on repeating (as the super-quoted Lawrence Peter “Yogi” Berra once put it).
But we can’t quote saying that you have been misquoted (Groucho Marx). A quote is an total, illegitimate and absolutely modern appropriation (Arthur Rimbaud). Today, everybody copies without realizing that problems can’t be fixed with the same dynamics that generated them (A. Eintstein). We need to shock the system (Billy Idol) in order to blow in the wind (Bob Dylan) of a politically-correct generation that criticizes everyone in order to avoid criticizing anybody (Afterhours) and thinks that it only takes a day to earn a lifetime (Ivan) and hides behind its huge banality (Susan Sontag).
Besides the literary exercise of writing a text by only using aphorisms, originality is only a distinctive trait that allows us to differentiate us within our reference environment. Originality, as a mean to create new business models ,value propositions, thoughts or, to paraphrase W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne new blue oceans to be sailed.