In Shakespeare’s era, David Epstein explains (in Inside the Box), creativity was more associated with the ability to improve upon something that existed than with sheer originality:
If the audience already knew the story, they could readily take in the unique aspects that each new creator brought to it.
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Robert McKee, in his classic screenwriting book Story, coined the term “Archplot” to describe the structure of nearly every Hollywood hit.
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The more creative the setting of a film, McKee explains, the more closely it must hew to Archplot in order to resonate with a wide audience. He points to the counterintuitive fact that “of all genres Fantasy is the most rigid and structurally conventional.”
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The stranger the setting, the more conventional the plot. (Conversely, for Woolf to use new narrative methods, she had to stick with extremely conventional settings.)
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In a classic paper on technological innovation, a pair of researchers coined the term “robust design” to describe features that help the intended audience immediately place a new thing in the context of a familiar world.
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At every turn, Edison used design choices that made adoption easy. He initially limited bulbs to 13 watts so that they would produce light similar to familiar gas lamps, and he retained lampshades even though they were no longer needed to protect gas flames from a draft. The effect was such that adopters might hardly realize that they were bathed in a new kind of light. For charging customers, Edison employed meters based on the familiar devices used by gas companies, even though this meant that early customers got six months of free lighting because he hadn’t yet figured out a way for meters to measure usage. Every choice Edison made prioritized the social context, even when that made his job more difficult, and even when it meant defying his most important backers.
In order to mimic the existing utility distribution system, Edison wanted to use underground wires to carry electricity from a central generation point to many buildings. But two of his biggest investors, William Vanderbilt and J. P. Morgan, insisted that Edison instead sell isolated systems of small generators, wires, and lights to individual customers. Edison had to threaten to resign to get his way. It led to lighting that was far easier for new customers to understand and use than if everyone had to manage their own isolated system. In just a decade, Edison replaced not only New York City’s gas lights with incandescent bulbs, but the gas infrastructure that had been both physically and deeply politically ingrained in the city for fifty years. “Edison triumphed over the gas industry not by clearly distinguishing his new system,” the researchers wrote, “but, rather, by initially cloaking it in the mantle of these established institutions.”
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What I’ve been calling “Virginia Woolf’s rope”—the link to something familiar when trying something new—a Harvard Business School professor referred to with the more management-like moniker: “optimal newness.”
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Some papers relied on highly novel combinations of knowledge: They primarily cited areas of research that rarely (or never) appeared together. Others cited only familiar combinations that recur constantly. But the “hit” papers, those that went on to be used by a huge number of other scientists, struck a balance. Papers that were grounded in conventional knowledge combinations, but featured an injection of unusual combinations, were at least twice as likely as average papers to become scientific blockbusters.
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Most management concepts were fads that disappeared quickly. The ideas that made an impact in the long run were those that embedded something new in something already established.
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Whether it is making new music, new Broadway shows, new movies, new video games, or new companies, the most successful teams tend to comprise members who have a wide variety of prior work experiences, but also some team members with prior collaborations or common background experiences. Creative teams that include only repeat collaborators, or, conversely, teams with only new members who have no common background experience, are less likely to find their way to the familiarity/ originality sweet spot.
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There was no need for many early electric vehicles to be charged via a cable that looks just like a gas hose with a gas nozzle that plugs into a port near where a nonexistent gas tank would be, nor for an electric pickup truck with no engine under the hood to keep the same shape as its gasoline-powered cousins.
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Today, this design principle is sometimes called skeuomorphism: New stuff retains facets of old stuff (like the “folders” on your computer) in order to communicate to users what the new stuff can do. “Without invoking existing understandings,” the Edison researchers warned, “innovations may never be understood and adopted in the first place.”