Borrowing Brilliance

There is no such thing as a truly original idea. Admit it, you’ve borrowed an idea before: from a competitor, a coworker, or the kid sitting next to you in the fifth grade. Borrowing Brilliance is a controversial, “big think” audiobook, challenging our notions of intellectual property and authorship, and exploring the evolution of a creative idea.

Creative ideas were once the territory of the entrepreneur, the marketing department, and the advertising agency, but now they are the responsibility of every employee within a company. A new business discipline is emerging—“innovation” is now a department in many creative companies, tasked with generating new ideas. Murray knows because he was the head of innovation for the Fortune 500 software company Intuit. He was charged with teaching “creativity” to the members of the company. And that’s where his “borrowing brilliance” program originated.

Most people believe creativity is a gift; that it can’t be taught; that it’s innate in your thinking process, and either you have it or you don’t. But Murray lifts the veil off the creative process, bringing it from the shadows of the subconscious mind into the conscious world. Creativity is not the result of divine intervention; it is something that can be learned and it is easily within reach.