A lot of you probably know *West Side Story*, one of the most famous modern musicals. Why was it so successful? The production took traditional things like ballet dancing, singing performances, and spoken word and applied them to portray progressive things like inequality and racism. The musical itself was even loosely based on Shakespeare, which is a known classic, especially in Western theatre. They didn’t invent anything groundbreakingly new, so where did the success come from?

And that’s the thing! You don’t have to reinvent the wheel. You just have to build something new using that wheel. Innovation doesn’t have to start from scratch. Some ground concepts and ideas are in place for a reason, and messing with them for the sake of something completely new probably won’t get you far. Instead, you should take those ground concepts and use them in new ways.

In 2011, two business professors at Northwestern University, Brian Uzzi and Ben Jones, carried out an interesting study. They created an algorithm and analyzed about 17.9 million academic papers. The results stated that even in the most creative papers, 90 percent of the content had already been published elsewhere. So, only 10 percent or less were the authors’ original ideas. The success of those papers had nothing to do with authors discovering previously unheard concepts. Rather, they took existing ideas and utilized them in new ways. Innovation doesn’t seem so scary and impossible when we break it down like that, does it? Well, here’s one more helpful tip to boost your creative capabilities: if everything else fails, get in touch with your emotions and let them guide you. After all, your intuition is one of the most powerful tools at your disposal. And although you probably won’t achieve success by using intuition alone, it might certainly help along the way.

For example, when the currently popular movie *Frozen* was being screened in front of the Disney team, it didn’t receive much positive feedback. Keep in mind that this was just a couple of months before the movie was supposed to be released. Edwin Catmull, Disney Animation President, told the production team to approach the process from a different angle. He asked them to analyze their relationships with their siblings in order to portray Anna and Elsa accurately. And it worked — the movie was a roaring success.