IF you have ever attended an innovation conference, you will be familiar with consultants’ graphs that show how, say, the second half of the 21st century will belong to African millennials relentlessly networking via wearable mobile devices.

But what has struck me recently is not so much the extraordinary potential of the future, but the extent to which innovators draw on ingredients from the present and the past.

Novelty is virtually the only common element in many definitions of innovation. But any corporate leader who assumes these products or processes must be conjured from scratch will condemn his innovation department to futile hours in the lab.

Gambling that a rare flash of genius will generate a brand new, commercially viable idea is expensive and time-consuming. Google’s Larry Page is confident enough about his start-ups to refer to them as ‘zero-billion-dollar-companies’, the implication being that they have billion dollar potential. But even he has had to focus on a few such projects, from the driver-less car to smart contact lenses.

True innovators’ eureka moments are more likely to spring from the realisation that the elements they need to create a new and marketable product or service already exist — just not yet in a form that most people want or are able to use.

True innovators’ eureka moments are more likely to spring from the realisation that the elements they need to create a new and marketable product or service already exist — just not yet in a form that most people want or are able to use

Shai Reshef, who built his University of the People to offer affordable online qualifications to anyone, described it in this way at last week’s FT Innovate conference in London: “I realised that everything that made higher education so expensive was already available — and for free.”

The assumption that the components of successful innovation are ‘already available’ should be liberating for companies.

Open-mindedness about where those components can be found will lead companies to different places — beyond known innovation hotspots. For example, a survey prepared for Johnston Press, the regional media group, identified Greater Manchester and Merseyside as the UK regions with the best combination of elements for innovation outside London.

An open mind also leads to different people. General Electric — still often castigated, I think unfairly, as an exemplar of a hidebound conglomerate approach — sourced a new design for the bracket that attaches its engines to aircraft through an online 3D printing challenge. (The winner was an Indonesian engineer, whose blueprint for a stronger, lighter model was initially pooh-poohed by GE’s experienced in-house team.)

A model approach to business

September 5, 2014: The professor of technology and innovation management at the University of St Gallen, Switzerland tells Della Bradshaw that the route to innovation may be to copy someone else.

In some cases, innovators go back to the past for inspiration. One of Johnston Press’s case studies, from Portsmouth, on England’s south coast, is Pie & Vinyl, a café that sells long-playing records and comfort food, in a shop decorated with locally sourced antiques and knick-knacks. “You don’t have to be digital to be innovative,” as Ashley Highfield, Johnston Press’s chief executive, pointed out, praising the combination.

On a larger scale, Diageo, the drinks company, recently dug from the Guinness archives century-old recipes for porter, a traditional beer, which it has brewed and packaged with a retro label. Whether or not the porter sells well, Diageo says the Guinness brand will benefit from this association with its heritage.

You can argue whether this type of innovation is truly novel. But start-ups that pitched to FT Innovate delegates last week also combine old and new. Readbug, a magazine subscription service, gives new digital life to print publications. Pocket Anatomy, a phone and tablet app to help doctors explain conditions more clearly to patients, animates anatomical diagrams that Leonardo da Vinci would have recognised. POD Point is building electric vehicle charging infrastructure on what looks like a standard franchise model: it sells its charge points to individuals and businesses to fund expansion of the whole network.

The minimum requirement for an innovation, according to the OECD’s Oslo Manual — a handbook about how to collect and interpret data — is that ‘the product, process, marketing method or organisational method must be new (or significantly improved)’.

Impatient corporate bosses sometimes need reminding that it is possible to achieve that objective by mixing mundane elements that may be right in front of them, leaving the innovator to furnish the most important ingredient: fresh thinking.

andrew.hill@ft.com

Twitter: @andrewtghill

Published in Dawn, Economic & Business, December 1st , 2014