Startup Ideas: How do you know if your startup idea already exists?For most of my adult life, I worked in creative departments, both online and offline. I've always spent time with people labeled as creative, some who even considered themselves masters (aargh!). Nowadays, at the peak of my maturity, if there is such thing, I firmly believe that the term "Creative" is totally inappropriate.
I say this without the fear of being wrong and remembering what Antoine Lavoisier said over 200 years ago: "Nothing is created, everything is transformed."
Totally immersed by such thought, very few, or even better, few rare exceptions create something in the full meaning of the word, and I’ll include myself in that group.
I believe we observe, absorb, and transform things that attract our attention, either positively due simply to their existence or negatively because they bother us. The latter creates a gap, and in order to solve such “issue,” we get an idea (which I still don’t know how it happens). But we end up thinking of a solution, something that innovates or gives a new perspective to same situation.
Instead of calling such people creative, we should refer to them as “transformers” - not as the heroic Autobots, but rather in the sense of being transformational people.
Picasso once said "Good artists copy, great artists steal", while Steve Jobs himself, in an interview given in 1994 about the Apple Macintosh, stated "We have always been shameless about stealing great ideas." He was probably referring to Xerox PARC (who knows?).
But it was the same Steve Jobs who decades later sued those copying Apple, saying back in 2010 "I'm going to destroy Android because it is a stolen product." That is a very ironic statement, but a subject for another time.
If something already exists, then we should say that we copy (I know many will hate me for the term that I am using, but it is true) and transform, or as some might say, we are inspired to adapt to a new vision.
I extend this thought to all artistic areas – for many years I worked in the music industry and I've heard a lot of music using sampling (1), several of them very well produced. Nonetheless, taking a sample then changing the pitch and adding filters and other features is not a creation, but a transformation with props and still a copy.
Daft Punk, the French electronic music duo formed in 1993 by Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo and Thomas Bangalter is a great example the real Daft Punk (Discovery Samples)
There is a video called "Everything is Remix" (Everything is a Remix (all parts) - YouTube), which shows much better and in more details what I am talking about; a video that was also copied and transformed.
In fact, this article is nothing more than a copy adapted to my optics of the video above. Transformers.
(1) Sampling is the act of taking a portion, or sample, of one sound recording and reusing it as an instrument or a sound recording in a different song or piece.
https://www.quora.com/Startup-Ideas-How-do-you-know-if-your-startup-idea-already-exists
