The method Robbins suggested for jump-starting the creative process—taking proven, conventional ideas from other settings and combining them in new ways—is remarkably effective, it turns out. It’s a tactic all kinds of people have used to spark creative successes. In 2011, two Northwestern University business school professors began examining how such combinations occur in scientific research. “Combinations of existing material are centerpieces in theories of creativity, whether in the arts, the sciences, or commercial innovation,” they wrote in the journal Science in 2013. And yet most original ideas grow out of old concepts, and “the building blocks of new ideas are often embodied in existing knowledge.” Why are some people so much better at taking those old blocks and stacking them in new ways, the researchers wondered?
The researchers—Brian Uzzi and Ben Jones—decided to focus on an activity they were deeply familiar with: writing and publishing academic papers. They had access to a database of 17.9 million scientific manuscripts published in more than twelve thousand journals. The researchers knew there was no objective way to measure each paper’s creativity, but they could estimate a paper’s originality by analyzing the sources authors had cited in their endnotes. “A paper that combines work by Newton and Einstein is conventional. The combination has happened thousands of times,” Uzzi told me. “But a paper that combines Einstein and Wang Chong, the Chinese philosopher, that’s much more likely to be creative, because it’s such an unusual pairing.” Moreover, by focusing primarily on the most popular manuscripts in the database—those studies that had been cited by other researchers thousands of times—they could estimate each manuscript’s creative input. “To get into the top 5 percent of the most frequently cited studies, you have to say something pretty new,” Uzzi said.
Uzzi and Jones—along with their colleagues Satyam Mukherjee and Mike Stringer—wrote an algorithm to evaluate the 17.9 million papers. By examining how many different ideas each study contained, whether those ideas had been mentioned together previously, and if the papers were popular or ignored, their program could rate each paper’s novelty. Then they could look to see if the most creative papers shared any traits.
The analysis told them that some creative papers were short; others were long. Some were written by individuals; the majority were composed by teams. Some studies were authored by researchers at the beginning of their careers; others came from more senior faculty.
In other words, there were lots of different ways to write a creative study.
But almost all of the creative papers had at least one thing in common: They were usually combinations of previously known ideas mixed together in new ways. In fact, on average, 90 percent of what was in the most “creative” manuscripts had already been published elsewhere—and had already been picked over by thousands of other scientists. However, in the creative papers, those conventional concepts were applied to questions in manners no one had considered before. “Our analysis of 17.9 million papers spanning all scientific fields suggests that science follows a nearly universal pattern,” Uzzi and Jones wrote. “The highest-impact science is primarily grounded in exceptionally conventional combinations of prior work yet simultaneously features an intrusion of unusual combinations.” It was this combination of ideas, rather than the ideas themselves, that typically made a paper so creative and important.
If you consider some of the biggest intellectual innovations of the past half century, you can see this dynamic at work. The field of behavioral economics, which has remade how companies and governments operate, emerged in the mid-1970s and ’80s when economists began applying long-held principles from psychology to economics, and asking questions like why perfectly sensible people bought lottery tickets. Or, to cite other juxtapositions of familiar ideas in novel ways, today’s Internet social networking companies grew when software programmers borrowed public health models that were originally developed to explain how viruses spread and applying them to how friends share updates. Physicians can now map complicated genetic sequences rapidly because researchers have transported the math of Bayes’ rule into laboratories examining how genes evolve.
Fostering creativity by juxtaposing old ideas in original ways isn’t new. Historians have noted that most of Thomas Edison’s inventions were the result of importing ideas from one area of science into another. Edison and his colleagues “used their knowledge of electromagnetic power from the telegraph industry, where they first worked, to transfer old ideas [to the industries of] lighting, telephone, phonograph, railway and mining,” two Stanford professors wrote in 1997. Researchers have consistently found that labs and companies encourage such combinations to spark creativity. A 1997 study of the consumer product design firm IDEO found that most of the company’s biggest successes originated as “combinations of existing knowledge from disparate industries.” IDEO’s designers created a top-selling water bottle, for example, by mixing a standard water carafe with the leak-proof nozzle of a shampoo container.
The power of combining old ideas in new ways also extends to finance, where the prices of stock derivatives are calculated by mixing formulas originally developed to describe the motion of dust particles with gambling techniques. Modern bike helmets exist because a designer wondered if he could take a boat’s hull, which can withstand nearly any collision, and design it in the shape of a hat. It even reaches to parenting, where one of the most popular baby books—Benjamin Spock’s The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care, first published in 1946—combined Freudian psychotherapy with traditional child-rearing techniques.
“A lot of the people we think of as exceptionally creative are essentially intellectual middlemen,” said Uzzi. “They’ve learned how to transfer knowledge between different industries or groups. They’ve seen a lot of different people attack the same problems in different settings, and so they know which kinds of ideas are more likely to work.”
Within sociology, these middlemen are often referred to as idea or innovation brokers. In one study published in 2004, a sociologist named Ronald Burt studied 673 managers at a large electronics company and found that ideas that were most consistently ranked as “creative” came from people who were particularly talented at taking concepts from one division of the company and explaining them to employees in other departments. “People connected across groups are more familiar with alternative ways of thinking and behaving,” Burt wrote. “The between-group brokers are more likely to express ideas, less likely to have ideas dismissed, and more likely to have ideas evaluated as valuable.” They were more credible when they made suggestions, Burt said, because they could say which ideas had already succeeded somewhere else.
“This is not creativity born of genius,” Burt wrote. “It is creativity as an import-export business.”
What’s particularly interesting, however, is that there isn’t a specific personality associated with being an innovation broker. Studies indicate that almost anyone can become a broker—as long as they’re pushed the right way.
Before rehearsals began for West Side Story, Robbins went to his colleagues and said he was dissatisfied with the musical’s first scene. As initially envisioned, the show opened in a traditional manner with the play’s characters introducing themselves via dialogue that illustrated the plot’s central tensions:
ACT 1
SCENE 1
A-rab, a teenager dressed in the uniform of his gang (THE JETS) comes across the stage. Suddenly, two DARK-SKINNED BOYS plummet down from a wall, crashing A-rab to the ground and attacking him. The attackers run off and then several boys—dressed like A-rab—run on from the opposite side.
DIESEL
It’s A-rab!
BABY JOHN
He was hit hard.
ACTION
An’ right on our own turf!
Riff, the leader of THE JETS, enters
RIFF
Straight factualities, A-rab. Who did it?
ACTION
Those buggin’ Puerto Ricans!
DIESEL
We’re supposed to be the champeens in this area—
MOUTHPIECE
The PR’s ’re crowdin’ us like their lousy families ’re crowdin’ ours!
A-RAB
Let’s have some action, Riff.
ACTION
Let’s put it on the PRs!
BABY JOHN
A rumble!
RIFF
Whoa, buddy boys! Whadda you diapers know from rumbles? The state of your ignorance is appalling. How do you think the top brass go about a war?
BABY JOHN
Crack-O Jack-O!
RIFF