Rochester Business Journal

David Kord Murray’s recent book “Borrowing Brilliance” suggests that innovations result from borrowing ideas from different disciplines, putting them together and building on them.

Murray was a rocket scientist working on projects involving the space shuttle and the International Space Station. When he tired of that, he gravitated to finance, started his own finance company, sold it, started another, went broke, joined Intuit Inc. and developed several innovative marketing programs. Intuit’s leaders thought he was so creative that they made him the firm’s head of innovation. His job: Teach others to come up with new ideas.

Years of study led Murray to a fundamental conclusion: Great ideas are built on the ideas of others. As Isaac Newton said when accused of borrowing ideas from Rene Descartes and John Wallis to create calculus, “I stand on the shoulders of giants.” Or as Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “Genius borrows nobly.”

Murray describes Sergey Brin and Larry Page’s creation of Google while they were doctoral candidates at Stanford University. Brin was doing research in data mining, Page on the Digital Library Technologies Project. Both used search engines but complained that they couldn’t find what they needed.

Then Brin picked up on an idea from one of the search engines he used: It listed the number of links a Web site contained, although it didn’t prioritize them. Page realized from his work on the library project that the more significant a work, the more frequently it was cited—especially by other notable people. He also recognized the importance of indexing. Putting these ideas together provided the basis for their Google platform.

Microsoft Corp. got its start when Bill Gates and Paul Allen were at Harvard University. They had worked with a programming language called BASIC and borrowed its structure to develop a program for the first personal computer—the Altair. When IBM Corp. wanted to buy an operating system from Gates, he borrowed code from Seattle Computer to create MS-DOS.

Movie director George Lucas is another borrower. He got his start at the University of Southern California’s film school, where he and other students were required to make 20-minute films. Lucas remembered the “short” films he saw in coffeehouses and jazz clubs around San Francisco. So instead of making 20-minute films, he would make short films. For a final project he created “Electronic Labyrinth: THX 1138 4EB.” It won the National Student Film Festival and got him an internship with Warner Brothers.

Later Lucas borrowed an idea from a college professor, Joseph Campbell. Campbell had built on the works of anthropologist Adolf Bastian and psychiatrist Carl Jung to suggest that all myths had a common fundamental structure. Lucas used this structure as the basis for his iconic “Star Wars” series.

Murray’s thesis echoes the arguments made by Malcolm Gladwell. In The New Yorker magazine, Gladwell theorized that big ideas are not rare. In support of the theory he provided several examples of innovations that happened almost simultaneously because, he said, they were “in the air.” And where is the air thickest with ideas? Universities. In fact, the ideas described earlier all started in universities.

Gladwell writes of a group of professors who operationalized this theory by forming a company (Intellectual Ventures) to create inventions. They expected to apply for 100 patents a year; today they are filing 500. Recently they licensed some of those patents for $80 million.

Rochester is fortunate to have highly rated colleges within a short commute. It would be relatively easy to look for ideas by walking through the halls, attending events and meeting professors and students. Many of the halls have posters describing the research being done.

At Rochester Institute of Technology, walk through the Slaughter building and get ideas for remanufacture and predicting mechanical failures. Step over to the Carlson building for ideas about imaging and optics, to Golisano for gaming and computer visualization to Engineering for robotics, and so on. Walk around the University of Rochester for a similar experience.

Borrow these ideas, build on them by working with the researchers, and Rochester could be home to the next big idea.

Ashok Rao is dean of Rochester Institute of Technology’s E. Philip Saunders College of Business.