The Four Lenses of Innovation: A Power Tool for Creative Thinking

Leveraging resources

from others

More often than not, successful innovations are recombinations of some kind. They take existing ideas, resources, and domains, and bring them together in a whole new mix, or in a new market context. It might be popular to think of innovators as lone inventors sitting there staring out of the window waiting for a light bulb to appear above their heads, but the reality is that most truly innovative people are synthesizers who are very well connected with the world around them, and who find ways to join the dots between what is already out there. In many cases, that means borrowing or buying competencies and assets from other firms to produce novel solutions.

When Steve Jobs led the team at Apple that developed the original Macintosh computer in the early 1980s, he famously exploited revolutionary ideas he had seen at Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research Center)—the graphical user interface and mouse, along with pop-up menus, icons, and windows—which the Macintosh group then recombined with its own concepts. Apple was thus able to profitably leverage assets that Xerox was underutilizing and failed to commercialize. Years later, when Jobs returned to Apple, it was initially to integrate technology assets from his NeXT computer and its UNIX-based operating system into Apple’s products, with Mac OS X being one direct result. Many assume that the iPod was developed exclusively at Apple, but in fact the reference platform for the device was designed by a company ...