Creative Remixing
“The practice of combining existing ideas from different domains to create something new.”
You're stuck on a problem that feels unique. Your industry's usual answers aren't working. Somewhere outside your sector, someone solved this years ago.
Creative Remixing is the practice of combining existing ideas from different domains to create something new. You deliberately seek analogies across industries and apply solutions from one context to another. As Kirby Ferguson's Everything is a Remix documents, most innovation is recombination rather than pure invention.
Originality is often just appropriation from a field that hasn't been paying attention to yours. The technique's unique strength is turning broad curiosity into a competitive advantage — the more domains you understand, the more combinations become possible.
Reach for it when your team keeps producing variations on the same tired ideas, or when a problem has resisted every approach native to your industry. It fails without genuinely diverse inputs; remixing within a single domain just produces more of the same. Intellectual property requires careful navigation — there's a line between inspiration and infringement, and it matters.
Your next move: Which industry that has nothing to do with yours has already solved the problem you're stuck on — and when did you last spend an hour looking outside your own sector for an answer?
“I've been told to 'be more innovative' and I don't know what that means.”