The world’s greatest playwright was a serial borrower. All of Shakespeare’s plays were inspired by original source material; Hamlet comes from the Old Norse Saga of King Rolf Kraki, while A Midsummer Night’s Dream was based on Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales.
Creativity copies
Forget true originality. Creativity requires external inspiration.
Owen Maclaren designed the undercarriage for the Spitfire, Britain’s most famous warplane, and years later applied the same thinking to create the first foldable pram. Aluminium rods enabled the plane undercarriage to retract and fold into the fuselage, so he used the same material for his prams.
In 1972, Steve Jobs’ curiosity compelled him to take a calligraphy class at college, despite knowing it wouldn’t count towards his final degree or thinking it would have any practical application. But his knowledge helped create the Apple Mac’s slick, user-friendly typography – an integral part of its mass-market appeal.
Audi’s iconic slogan was inspired by a factory tour. In the words of John Hegarty: “I had gone to Ingolstadt and found the factory and I saw a very old faded poster on the wall that someone had left up there,” Hegarty says. “I saw this line ‘Vorsprung durch Technik’. They said that was an old advertising line but ‘we don’t use it any more’. And it stuck in my brain.”