Innovation has become business’s favourite buzzword. Investors chase it, leaders celebrate it and organisations often feel compelled to create something entirely new simply to demonstrate progress. Yet the evidence suggests that successful organisations rarely succeed because they reinvent the wheel. More often, they succeed because they recognise what already works and adapt it intelligently.
I was reminded of this recently after reading about London’s mayor, Sadiq Khan, and his approach to public policy. Rather than pursuing novelty for its own sake, he has consistently favoured borrowing proven ideas from other cities before adapting them to London’s unique challenges. It was reassuring because it’s an approach I’ve long adopted in my own work.
Whether developing mentoring programmes or leadership initiatives, I rarely start with a blank page. Instead, I build on the thinking of recognised experts such as Professors David Clutterbuck, Bob Garvey, Jonathan Passmore and Julie Starr. The aim isn’t to copy someone else’s work; it’s to understand why it succeeds and then shape it for a different audience or purpose.
Research supports this approach. Recent systematic reviews of organisational change consistently conclude that success depends far less on novelty than on strong leadership, stakeholder engagement, evidence-based design and effective implementation. In other words, execution usually matters far more than originality.
So why do organisations continue chasing the next shiny idea?
Partly because innovation attracts attention. New concepts generate headlines, awards and investment, while refinement is often viewed as less exciting. Yet business history tells a different story. Many of the world’s most successful products and services are not entirely new inventions but thoughtful combinations of ideas that already existed.
Steven Johnson describes this as the adjacent possible: progress often comes from combining existing ideas in new ways rather than making giant leaps into the unknown. The smartphone is perhaps the best-known example. It didn’t invent the camera, GPS, internet browsing or portable music. It brought together technologies people were already using and transformed the way they created value.
Borrowing ideas can feel uncomfortable because it is easily confused with copying. Nobody wants to be seen as a copycat. Yet every successful industry builds on existing knowledge. If businesses didn’t learn from one another, there would be little progress at all. The real distinction lies between imitation and adaptation. One replicates; the other improves.
That principle is particularly relevant for SMEs. Time, money and resources are rarely unlimited. Starting from scratch can be expensive, risky and unnecessarily complex when proven solutions already exist. The more valuable question is not, “What can we invent?” but, “What already works, and how can we make it work better for our customers?”
Whenever I’m deciding whether to develop something new, I ask a series of simple questions. Has someone already solved this problem? Why did their solution succeed? What assumptions have changed since then? What can be simplified, removed or combined with something else? Most importantly, what does existing user feedback tell us? More often than not, the answers point towards adapting rather than reinventing.
It’s also worth separating invention from innovation because the two are frequently confused. Invention creates something genuinely new. Innovation creates value from an idea, whether that idea is groundbreaking or simply a better version of something that already exists. Businesses rarely need more invention. They usually need better implementation.
Of course, borrowing should never mean copying blindly. Every organisation serves a different audience with different needs, cultures and constraints. What worked in one setting may fail in another unless it is adapted with care.
That is precisely why London’s transport policies succeeded. Many were inspired by approaches already proven elsewhere in Europe, but they were carefully reshaped to suit London’s scale, governance, infrastructure and environmental challenges. The success came not from importing someone else’s ideas unchanged, but from understanding what made them effective and tailoring them to local circumstances.
Perhaps that’s the lesson more organisations need to embrace. Innovation doesn’t always begin with a blank sheet of paper. More often, it begins by asking who has already solved the problem, understanding why their solution worked and then making it even better. Borrowing brilliantly isn’t the opposite of innovation. Quite often, it’s where genuine innovation starts.
Sources: doi.org, Steven Johnson, London City Hall
