Borrow Brilliantly: Why Smart Businesses Don’t Reinvent Everything
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, evidence shows that successful organisations rarely succeed by reinventing the wheel. More often, they thrive by recognising what already works and adapting it intelligently.
This insight was recently reinforced when examining London’s mayor, Sadiq Khan’s approach to public policy. Rather than pursuing novelty for its own sake, Khan consistently favours borrowing proven ideas from other cities and tailoring them to London’s unique challenges. This practical mindset parallels approaches I have long adopted in my work.
Whether developing mentoring programmes or leadership initiatives, I rarely start with a blank page. Instead, I build on the thinking of recognised experts like Professors David Clutterbuck, Bob Garvey, Jonathan Passmore, and Julie Starr. The goal is not to copy but to understand why these methods succeed, then shape them for different audiences or purposes.
Execution Over Originality
Research consistently supports this approach. Systematic reviews of organisational change indicate that success depends far less on novelty and far more on strong leadership, stakeholder engagement, evidence-based design, and effective implementation. In other words, how well you execute usually matters far more than the originality of your idea.
So why do many organisations continue chasing the next shiny idea? Partly because innovation attracts attention. New concepts generate headlines, awards, and investment, while refinement is often seen as less exciting. However, business history tells a different story. Many of the world’s most successful products and services are not brand-new inventions but thoughtful recombinations of existing ideas.
Steven Johnson describes this concept 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 a prime example: it didn’t invent the camera, GPS, internet browsing, or portable music. Instead, it integrated these existing technologies and transformed how people create value.
Adapting, Not Copying
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. Without learning from one another, progress would stall. The real distinction lies between imitation and adaptation: one merely replicates, the other improves.
This principle is especially important for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), where time, money, and resources are limited. Starting from scratch is expensive, risky, and often unnecessarily complex when proven solutions already exist. Instead of asking, “What can we invent?” the more valuable question is, “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 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 another idea? Most importantly, what does existing user feedback tell us? More often than not, these answers point toward adapting rather than reinventing.
The Difference Between Invention and Innovation
It’s also useful to distinguish invention from innovation, as 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 an existing solution. 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 unique needs, cultures, and constraints. What worked in one setting might fail in another unless adapted thoughtfully.
That careful adaptation is exactly why London’s transport policies succeeded. Many were inspired by approaches proven elsewhere in Europe but reshaped to fit London’s scale, governance structures, infrastructure, and environmental challenges. Success came not from importing ideas unchanged but from understanding what made them effective and tailoring them to local circumstances.
Embracing Borrowed Innovation
Perhaps this is 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
