“The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources.” —Albert Einstein

The greatest innovators built upon the ideas of others to achieve success. Borrowing from other great minds is not intellectual theft, but rather the core to creative thinking techniques, says David Murray, author of the new book, Borrowing Brilliance: The Six Steps to Business Innovation, published by Penguin Group. Murray offers these examples.

Bill Gates borrowed the idea for Windows from Steve Jobs of Apple after he saw the prototype for the fi rst Macintosh. Jobs borrowed the idea from the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center. Xerox borrowed it from an obscure academic researcher. That’s why they are called the pirates of Silicon Valley.

Larry Page of Google didn’t invent the search engine—he just perfected it. His inspiration for ranking the
importance of a Web page came from academic research papers—the more references an academic research paper gets in other research papers, the more important the paper. He applied that thinking to the Web, reasoning that the more people who link to a site, the more important the site.

Mark Zuckerberg was still a student when he got his idea for Facebook from the face books his school printed every year with pictures of new students. He borrowed an existing concept and put it online where the idea took off.

Source:SUCCESS magazine