The Myth of Originality
Why true innovation emerges from imitation, disciplined curiosity, and idea abundance
Innovation is often portrayed as the heroic act of a lone genius pulling a brand-new idea out of thin air. In Silicon Valley lore, originality borders on the sacred – the “next big thing” must be unprecedented, disruptive, sui generis. But is genuine innovation really about making a clean break from the past? René Girard, the famed theorist of mimetic desire, provocatively suggests otherwise. In his essay “Innovation and Repetition” (1990), Girard argues that what we call innovation is frequently the offspring of imitation and repetition. In fact, the modern exaltation of absolute originality may be a kind of illusion – a myth that masks the deep mimetic undercurrents driving creative change.
This post puts Girard’s insights in dialogue with Bernard Lonergan’s cognitional theory and Jeremy Utley’s Ideaflow approach to creativity. By combining Girard’s historical-perspectival critique of innovation with Lonergan’s model of how the mind knows (experience, understanding, judgment, decision) and Utley’s practical principles (idea volume, divergence, creative discipline), we can paint a richer picture of how true innovation emerges from structured imitation and deliberate ideation. Along the way, we’ll look at examples from technology and startups – domains that pride themselves on novelty – to see how mimetic desire drives both innovation and competition in markets and culture. The goal is to challenge the idolization of originality and sketch a more mature model of innovation that respects tradition even as it iterates forward.
Innovation vs. Heresy: A Brief History of a Dirty Word
To begin with Girard’s key observation: historically, innovation was not always a compliment – far from it. The term itself comes from the Latin innovare (to renew or restore). Originally, innovation implied a kind of renewal from within, not a total novelty. But by the time the word entered common usage in the 16th and 17th centuries, it carried overwhelmingly negative connotations. In the late medieval and early modern mindset, any “new” idea or practice was suspect because it threatened to break continuity with sacred tradition.
In theology, innovation meant heresy – a culpable departure from timeless dogma. The worst thing you could do was “innovate” in matters of faith. Church leaders like Bossuet praised orthodoxy by saying nothing was innovated at the great councils. Even Reformation leaders, whom we now regard as innovators, vehemently denied introducing novelties; they saw themselves as restoring original Christianity and purging the Church of corrupt “Catholic innovations”. The Protestant cry was for authentic imitation of Christ, not creative experimentation. Likewise, Renaissance humanists decried the “innovations” of medieval scholastics – not because they hated imitation, but because they thought the wrong models had been imitated. Their solution was a return to imitation of the ancients (classical philosophers and artists) rather than any radical originality. In short, everyone agreed that good things were by definition stable and unchanging. Innovation, insofar as the word was used, meant upsetting the rightful order, whether in church, state, language, or art. As Montaigne put it: “Nothing harries a state except innovation; change alone gives form to injustice and tyranny.” For centuries, “new” was practically a synonym for “bad.”
What explains this deep suspicion? Girard points out that pre-modern societies were organized around transcendent models and traditions, what he calls a regime of external mediation. People understood themselves by measuring up to exemplary figures of the past or high-authority ideals – be it Christ, the saints, classical authors, or ancestors. Social order was thought to depend on unbroken continuity with these models; any breach could unleash chaos. In such a world, the very concept of innovating was barely needed: one simply imitated established models, and progress (if any) came through refinement and renewal, not invention ex nihilo. It’s telling that the word innovation only gained currency once this traditional paradigm started to wane.
By the 18th century, a profound shift was underway. The Enlightenment and the rise of science gradually rehabilitated the idea of innovation, giving it a positive glow it never had before. Technological and scientific breakthroughs showcased “innovation” as useful invention, not impious heresy. The core meaning of the word didn’t change – it still meant introducing something new – but its affective aura flipped from negative to positive. This change in attitude, Girard notes, was intertwined with the decline of external mediation and the rise of what he calls internal mediation. In modernity, people increasingly looked to their peers and contemporaries rather than distant ideals; the benchmark of value shifted from “How well do I conform to a model?” to “How much do I stand out relative to others?”. Originality – being different from everyone else – became a virtue in itself. In philosophical terms, individualism took root: the belief that individuals could (and should) be self-sufficient, drawing creativity from within rather than from tradition. No longer was it noble to be an imitator; the goal was to be an originator.
Thus, within a few centuries, innovation went from denoting dangerous deviation to glowing with the promise of progress. Yet, Girard cautions, this modern celebration of the new may rest on a false binary – the idea that imitation and innovation are opposites. We assume that to innovate means not to imitate, and to imitate is merely to copy rather than create. Girard’s thesis is that this is a misleading dichotomy. Beneath the modern glorification of originality, mimesis (imitation) remains the beating heart of how humans innovate. We have, in a sense, repressed our debt to imitation even as we unknowingly depend on it. To see this, we must examine how innovation actually happens in practice, especially in the realms we consider most innovative.
Imitation: The Hidden Engine of Innovation
Girard’s second key point is that innovation almost always arises through imitation – often creative or recombinative imitation, but imitation nonetheless. As he bluntly puts it, “the only short-cut to innovation is imitation.” It may be easier to imitate than to innovate, but more provocatively, imitation is frequently the very path by which innovation occurs. This claim flies in the face of what Girard calls the “modern ideology of absolute innovation,” which insists that true innovation must have no precedent. In reality, “in economic life, imitation and innovation are not only compatible but almost inseparable.” Every innovator imitates something – some prior idea, product, or role model – whether they admit it or not. The genuinely new emerges by playing off of the old, not in a vacuum.
Consider the technology industry, which prides itself on relentless innovation. Insiders readily acknowledge that copying is standard practice in tech. Instagram’s product chief, for example, openly defended copying Snapchat’s Stories feature by saying it would be “silly” not to borrow a good idea that clearly met a user need. “This is the way the tech industry works,” he noted, pointing out that if social apps never imitated each other, we’d have only one app with a news feed, one with hashtags, one with photo filters, etc. – clearly not the case. In truth, Silicon Valley’s vaunted “disruptive innovation” mostly happens via rapid, incremental iteration on prior art. As TechCrunch observed, the Valley talks about radical innovation but spends most of its time refining and recombining existing ideas. The smartphone in your pocket? It’s a descendant of earlier mobile and computing ideas: Apple’s breakthrough iPhone drew on the work of predecessors (the touchscreen computer, the cellphone, the iPod) and even “stole” concepts from Xerox’s research lab. (Steve Jobs famously loved the Picasso quote “Good artists copy, great artists steal,” and unabashedly applied it – he credited Xerox PARC’s interface as the inspiration for the Macintosh.) The breakthrough web search algorithms, social networks, electric cars – dig into any of these, and you find that today’s “innovator” started as yesterday’s imitator, mastering what came before and then tweaking, repurposing, or extending it in a novel way.
Girard would say this is no coincidence: mimetic behavior is hardwired into human learning and creativity. We learn by observing and emulating others. In business, a struggling company will imitate the practices of a successful competitor as a way to catch up – and only after absorbing those lessons might it add its own twist that qualifies as “innovative.” Early imitation can look slavish and unoriginal (Girard calls this the phase of “external mediation” where the model is followed rigidly). But once the imitator has caught up, they often start adapting and boldifying their approach, introducing genuine novelties on top of the borrowed elements. In other words, imitation can evolve into innovation. It’s a stepwise process: first imitate to learn the ropes, then gradually deviate and differentiate. There may be no such thing as “absolute innovation” – even the boldest new idea is usually a recombination of previous ideas – but there are degrees of novelty that emerge from imitation.
Modern culture, however, tends to deny this mimetic underpinning. We prefer the romance of the lone genius who owes nothing to anyone. Girard calls this “the romantic lie” – the notion that creativity wells up entirely from within an individual once they cast off all influence. The Romantics imagined that if we just stopped imitating, each person’s inner genius would spontaneously generate masterpieces. This “theology of the self” (as Girard dubs it) treats creativity almost as a divine attribute of the individual soul. But Girard’s analysis shows that when societies actually attempt to banish imitation, the result isn’t an explosion of creativity – it’s often stagnation or chaos. Expecting creativity with zero imitation is like “expecting a plant to grow with its roots up in the air”. Cut off from any grounding in prior knowledge, ideas wither. Indeed, the obligation to always be original can be more stifling to true novelty than the old obligation to never rebel. We see this in some arts and cultural movements: an avant-garde that obsessively avoids anything traditional may end up recycling shallow trends (ironically, a form of imitation) rather than producing works of lasting innovation. Girard quips that our age, after tiring of the modern obsession with the “New,” has lapsed into a “parody of innovation” – a kind of frantic, directionless copying of every style (“an orgy of casual imitation”) now that all fixed standards have been deconstructed. Imitation hasn’t disappeared; it’s simply become unmoored and indiscriminate.
So what’s the alternative? Girard is not suggesting we return to a rigid traditionalism that forbids novelty. Rather, he advocates a mimetic model of innovation that is conscious and disciplined. “Real change can only take root when it springs from the type of coherence that tradition alone provides,” Girard writes. The most fruitful innovations respect the past even as they transform it. They “challenge tradition from the inside,” mastering what has come before and then pushing its boundaries. The prerequisite for real innovation is a minimal respect for the past and a mastery of its achievements – in other words, mimesis. This kind of patient, focused imitation, akin to a craftsperson apprenticing to a master, creates the conditions for breakthrough creativity. By contrast, our contemporary fetish of originality often leads to shallow novelty (fashion) rather than substantive innovation. The difference is whether imitation is leveraged intelligently or denied altogether. When we consciously build on the shoulders of giants, we channel mimetic desire into progress; when we pretend we have no need for others’ ideas, we either secretly copy without understanding, or we end up reinventing the wheel poorly.
All this suggests that innovation is not a solo act of creation ex nihilo, but a dialogue with the past and with peers. It’s a dance of repetition and difference. But how, practically, does one engage in “structured imitation” without simply copying verbatim? How do we balance learning from others with adding our own insight? To answer that, it helps to turn to Lonergan’s cognitional theory – a framework for how the human mind comes to know and create – and to Jeremy Utley’s Ideaflow principles, which offer practical techniques for driving creativity in organizations. These will show us how imitation can be harnessed and transformed through a structured process of ideation and judgment.
Lonergan’s Four Levels: Experience, Understanding, Judgment, Decision
Bernard Lonergan, a 20th-century philosopher-theologian, is best known for analyzing the structure of human knowing. He identified four intentional levels of consciousness that we go through whenever we truly know or create something: Experience, Understanding, Judgment, and Decision. In brief, we first experience data (through our senses, imagination, and attention). We then seek to understand that data – we ask questions, look for insights or patterns, and formulate ideas. Next, we judge whether our understanding is correct – we marshal evidence, reflect, and verify if the idea actually holds true or solves the problem (this is sometimes called the rational level). Finally, we make a decision (the responsible level) – we deliberate on possible actions and choose to act (or not act) on the knowledge we’ve gained. In more informal terms: “What is happening?” (experience); “Why/how is it happening – what does it mean?” (understanding); “Is that really so – is my insight true or viable?” (judgment); and “What should I do about it?” (decision).
This framework might sound abstract, but it maps remarkably well onto the creative and innovative process. Consider an entrepreneur or inventor working on a new solution. It all starts with Experience: observing pain points, immersing in how things are currently done, and yes, studying existing solutions (here is where imitation initially enters). For example, a founder might spend time experiencing how users interact with current products, or how a particular technology functions. They might absorb the best practices in an industry – essentially an apprenticeship in what is already known. This corresponds to Lonergan’s empirical level: gathering the raw materials. In innovation, that could mean collecting user feedback, watching competitors, and exploring analogous fields (which, as we’ll see, aligns with Utley’s advice to seek diverse inputs). Nothing perceived or experienced is wasted here; even copying a competitor’s product to learn how it works can be invaluable data. Girard would note that at this stage one often has a model – an example of success or a benchmark – which one is scrutinizing and imitating to learn.
Next comes Understanding, Lonergan’s second level, where creativity truly sparks. Here the innovator asks, “What is the insight that can solve this problem? How can I make this better or different?” It’s the ideation phase: connecting dots from experience and forming a new concept or approach. Crucially, this is where imitation turns into innovation. Because one has rich experience (including of others’ ideas), the mind can combine and transform those elements into something novel. Lonergan calls the driving force here the “question for intelligence” – essentially curiosity that drives us to make sense of things. In an innovation context, this is brainstorming possibilities, imagining alternatives, and divergent thinking. Notably, the ideas generated at this stage are not guaranteed to be correct or useful – they are hypotheses, creative guesses at “what might work.” One might envision a new feature inspired by a competitor’s product but applied in a different domain (structured imitation), or have an aha-moment that reframes the problem entirely. Lonergan emphasizes that mere insight isn’t knowledge yet; it’s a bright idea that needs testing. Nonetheless, without this imaginative leap – which builds on what we know (or think we know) – no innovation is possible.
Then comes Judgment, the critical third level. Here the burning question is “Is it true? Will it work?” This is where the innovator evaluates and validates the brainstormed idea. Prototypes are built, experiments run, data gathered – all to answer the Lonerganian “question for reflection”, which asks whether the idea is grounded in reality. It’s a time for rigorous honesty: not every idea from the understanding phase is gold. Some turn out to be fool’s gold. Judgment separates feasible innovations from fanciful notions. In startup terms, this is when you test your assumptions (a nod to the lean startup method of rapid experimentation). Girard’s perspective subtly enters here too: one must avoid the blind spots of mimetic bias. For instance, if an idea was pursued merely out of rivalry (“we need to do this because our competitor did”), the judgment phase might reveal that it doesn’t actually add value – it was mimicry for its own sake. Good judgment will course-correct such errors. On the other hand, judgment might confirm that an insight truly improves on the status quo, enabling one to declare, “Yes, this is really something new and useful.” This level is about evidence and objectivity, ensuring that innovation isn’t just different for difference’s sake (i.e. empty novelty), but a meaningful improvement.
Finally, Decision. Knowing what is true or what might work is one thing; choosing to act on it is another. At Lonergan’s fourth level, the innovator asks, “Should I go for it? How do we implement this?” This involves considerations of value and responsibility. Perhaps the idea is technically sound – but is it ethical, is it aligned with our mission, does it serve a genuine human good? Or practically, do we have resources to execute it? In an entrepreneurial setting, this is the moment of commitment – to invest time, money, and reputation in the new venture. It’s also the moment of mimetic risk: once you go public, competitors may imitate you. But that’s expected – a strong innovation invites followers. This decision level loops back to experience in an ongoing cycle: once you act and put the innovation into the world, you (and others) will experience its effects, which starts the cycle anew (others will imitate you, perhaps, and then try to surpass you). In making the decision, a mature innovator also recognizes their debt to those who came before – acknowledging that their novel product is built on accumulated knowledge and prior models. This humility can guide better decisions (e.g. partnering with incumbents rather than blindly “disrupting,” or respecting certain regulatory or cultural boundaries rather than assuming you know best).
Lonergan’s model thus provides a structured, iterative process for innovation: Experience -> Insight -> Testing -> Action. It shows how imitation (learning from what exists) feeds insight, how insight must be tempered by critical evaluation, and how the outcome is a conscious choice that can have ethical dimensions. An important implication here is that innovation is a methodical process, not magic. Even the “creative spark” of understanding doesn’t come from nowhere; it comes from engaging deeply with experience (often the experience of others’ ideas, i.e. imitation). And that spark must undergo disciplined scrutiny and execution. This view harmonizes well with modern innovation frameworks (like design thinking’s emphathize/define – ideate – prototype/test – implement cycle) and with Jeremy Utley’s Ideaflow principles, which explicitly coach innovators to generate and test ideas in volume. Let’s turn to Utley’s approach to see how it complements Girard and Lonergan.
Ideaflow: Volume, Divergence, and Creative Discipline
Jeremy Utley, co-author of Ideaflow, approaches innovation from a very practical angle: how to consistently generate great ideas and solutions. His core message is straightforward but often counterintuitive to those obsessed with immediate originality: the secret to a good idea is a lot of ideas. Quantity leads to quality. “The secret to coming up with good ideas is coming up with many more ideas. What sets winners apart is volume,” Utley writes. This is the principle of idea volume. In practice, it means that teams and individuals should aim to produce a high ideaflow – measured as the number of novel ideas generated around a given problem per unit time. If you generate 100 ideas, the odds that one or two are truly innovative go up dramatically compared to if you stop at the first “okay” idea. Most of us, unfortunately, do stop too soon – we hit on something that seems decent and we run with it. Utley warns that this premature convergence is the enemy of innovation. Under pressure or out of habit, we fall back on the familiar rather than pushing into unexplored territory. His antidote: make idea generation a deliberate practice, almost like a daily workout, so that pushing past the obvious becomes second nature.
This leads to the next principle: divergence. Utley emphasizes the importance of divergent thinking – deliberately seeking out a wide variety of ideas, including wild or unconventional ones, before later converging on the best options. “Divergent thinking is crucial to explore the full space of possibilities before converging on the most promising direction,” he notes, “Volume and variety of input are both critical to healthy ideaflow.” In other words, it’s not enough to have a lot of ideas if they’re all variations of the same theme; you want to maximize diversity of approaches. One way to do this is to invite multiple perspectives and analogies. Utley suggests asking, “Who’s the last person I’d ever ask about this?” – meaning, seek input beyond your usual circle or domain, because cross-pollination can yield novel solutions. Another tactic is assumption reversal: identify your ingrained assumptions about a problem and flip them, just to see what new ideas emerge. All these methods are about breaking out of mimetic uniformity (everyone copying the same obvious model) and instead engaging in mimetic diversity – borrowing ideas from far-flung sources, mixing and matching them in imaginative ways. It echoes a point from cognitive science: “the brain is incapable of producing new material from scratch”; we create by combining what we have. So the more varied inputs you feed your brain, the more truly original combinations it can generate. Utley’s divergence principle, therefore, doesn’t reject imitation – it actually harnesses it, by encouraging us to look at many different things worth imitating (in part or whole) rather than slavishly following one model. This is structured imitation in a broad sense: scouring the world for inspirations and then riffing on them.
Finally, Utley underscores creative discipline. Innovation is not a one-off eureka moment; it’s an ongoing, repeatable process – a practice. In fact, “Innovation is not an event; it’s a practice,” as the Ideaflow book says upfront. Creative discipline means establishing habits and systems that foster continuous ideation and experimentation. For instance, Utley encourages setting an “idea quota” – say, write 10 new ideas every day for a particular challenge. This trains your mind to keep digging past the obvious ideas (which usually dry up after the first few) into the more interesting territory that lies beyond. It’s analogous to Lonergan’s notion of attentiveness at the level of experience and inquiry at the level of understanding – you have to consciously pursue insights, not just wait for lightning to strike. Discipline also applies to testing ideas: Utley advocates a rigorous experimentation culture. Rather than debating which idea is best in theory, run cheap tests to gather data. This is a disciplined approach to Lonergan’s judgment level – it formalizes the verification step through rapid prototyping and feedback loops.
Moreover, creative discipline involves embracing failure and redundancy. Generating, say, 100 ideas means 96 will not be used if you only need 4 good ones. That feels inefficient, but it’s actually the cost of true innovation – a paradoxical discipline of waste for the sake of value. In Girardian terms, one might say we have to be willing to “sacrifice” many mimetic attempts in order to find the fruitful divergence. Utley’s approach encourages a mindset shift: don’t see discarded ideas as wasted, see them as necessary steps in the process of discovery. A disciplined innovator will keep imitating, exploring, and tweaking, even when most attempts don’t pan out, trusting that this process will yield gold.
To recap Utley’s key points (as we’ll integrate them): maximize idea volume (don’t stop at the first decent idea), embrace divergence (inject variety and seek inspiration widely), and institutionalize creativity as a daily discipline. When combined with Girard’s insights, this suggests an ideal innovator is one who enthusiastically imitates many models and generates many possibilities, not one who sits in isolation striving to be utterly sui generis from the start. Utley gives us the how-to toolkit to operationalize Girard’s mimetic model of innovation and Lonergan’s cognitive stages.
Structured Imitation in Action: How Real Innovation Happens
Let’s bring these threads together and illustrate how structured imitation plus deliberate ideation produce genuine innovation. We’ll use a tech entrepreneurship lens, since it’s familiar and instructive, but the principles apply across domains (arts, science, social innovation, etc.).
Consider a founder setting out to create a new product in the fintech space. A naive approach would be: “I want to be completely original – I won’t look at what anyone else has done, I’ll dream up something entirely new from scratch.” This sounds bold, but it’s likely a recipe for failure (or at best, reinventing an existing solution unwittingly). A Girard-Lonergan-Utley informed approach would look very different:
Begin with rich experiences and models (Mimetic Apprenticeship): Our founder would start by studying the industry deeply – using Girard’s advice to respect tradition and Lonergan’s first level. They might imitate as a learning strategy: use all the popular finance apps, note what works and what frustrates users, examine how successful companies make money, even copy a competitor’s workflow step-by-step to understand its efficiency. This is akin to a painter copying old masters to learn technique. It’s not “stealing ideas” to launch immediately, it’s absorbing ideas to build a foundation. Steve Jobs did exactly this visiting Xerox PARC; the Wright brothers meticulously read about and copied prior glider experiments before innovating the airplane; countless startups begin by emulating an existing business model but serving a new market. This stage corresponds to Lonergan’s experience, enriched by Utley’s suggestion of mining perspectives far and wide (our founder might also look at analogies – e.g., how do people manage money in video games or in completely different cultures? – to gather more inspiration). Through this process, our innovator isn’t aimless: they have a structured intent to identify patterns and gaps. For example, they might notice, “All these apps cater to experienced investors; none mimic the hand-holding approach that novice users get from personal advisors.” That observation is the seed of insight.
Divergent ideation (Insight through recombination): Armed with diverse inputs, the founder now hits Lonergan’s understanding phase – brainstorming solutions. They might pose a “How might we…” question: “How might we create a novice-friendly investing platform?” Following Utley’s ideaflow approach, they’ll generate dozens of possible features or concepts without judging them yet. This is where structured imitation turns creative. For instance, they recall how a fitness app onboards new users with a tutorial – could a finance app imitate that? They remember a game that made learning fun – could they integrate game-like rewards? They consider mimicking the tone of a friendly financial advisor rather than the usual sterile graphs. Each of these ideas is borrowing something existing (tutorial flows, gamification, humanistic tone) and applying it in a new context. By explicitly encouraging divergent ideas, they avoid getting stuck on the first idea that comes (maybe initially they thought of just simplifying the interface, but deeper ideation yields more novel possibilities like a virtual mentor or a community feature for peer learning). Throughout, note that nothing is ex nihilo: the originality lies in the combination or transposition of elements from different sources. The founder is effectively saying, “Let me imitate X from industry A, Y from industry B, and Z from the traditional approach, and integrate them into something fresh in my product.” This is Girard’s mimetic creativity at work – innovation as remix. At this stage, quantity is key; many ideas will be silly or unfeasible, but that’s okay. Perhaps out of 50 ideas, a few shine: e.g., a clever onboarding chatbot that uses humor to teach investing, or a feature that lets users simulate trades in a risk-free sandbox. These are then taken forward.
Critical filtering and testing (Judgment with discipline): Now we move to Lonergan’s judgment level – time to test the promising ideas. Our founder prototypes the chatbot and the sandbox feature. Maybe they build a quick mock-up or run a small pilot with target users. The goal is to see which ideas actually achieve the desired result (help novices invest confidently) and which fall flat. This is where reality hits – an essential step to avoid innovator’s hubris. Suppose the sandbox simulation is a hit (users love playing with fake money to learn), but the humor chatbot annoys users (finance is serious to them). The founder must be ready to discard certain inspirations – not all imitative ideas will pan out – and refine or double down on the ones that do. Utley’s principle of an innovation pipeline comes into play: ideas are not simply kept or killed, but iteratively refined. The sandbox feature, for instance, might be iterated to add social competition (another borrowed idea, say from Duolingo’s leaderboards, further imitating from outside). This evaluation phase is also where mimetic desire can inject both urgency and caution: seeing a competitor launch something similar might spur the founder to move faster (desire not to be left behind), or to differentiate more. It’s a delicate balance – competition can drive innovation by pushing each player to keep improving (each imitates and then one-ups the other in a virtuous cycle for consumers), but it can also tempt one into counter-innovation (doing the opposite of a rival just to seem original, even if it’s worse – a pride-driven trap Girard identifies). A disciplined approach uses feedback and reason to guide which path to take, rather than ego or fear alone.
Implementation and iteration (Decision and renewal): Finally, our founder decides to fully build and launch the product with the validated features. This Lonergan decision is informed by all the prior steps – they are confident the innovation truly addresses a need in a better way. In making this move, they’re also consciously entering the mimetic market dynamics: the product will now invite imitation from others if successful. That’s expected – in fact, it’s a sign of success. The founder should remain vigilant (another cycle of experience) to keep innovating ahead, possibly by continually repeating the above process. This is where a culture of innovation matters: if the team has internalized that innovation is continuous and built on collective learning, they won’t rest on their laurels. They’ll keep observing users and competitors (experience), generating new ideas (understanding) in regular brainstorms, testing improvements (judgment through A/B tests, etc.), and making product decisions (decision) in an ongoing loop. In doing so, they are practicing what Girard describes as challenging tradition from within – except “tradition” here might be their own first version product! They iterate forward, always balancing continuity and change. And importantly, a wise innovator in this stage does not boast “I had a completely original idea,” but rather, “I saw an opportunity by learning from what was out there, and we created something new by building on it.” Such an attitude not only is honest (acknowledging shoulders of giants) but keeps one open to further learning (remaining mimetically agile).
This hypothetical illustrates that successful innovation is a blend of copying and creativity, repetition and difference. The fintech product might end up genuinely novel in the market – say it revolutionizes how a segment invests – but it did so precisely by synthesizing existing ideas in a new configuration, not by ignoring everything that came before.
We see the same pattern in many tech breakthroughs. The first web browser Mosaic combined the concepts of hypertext (existing academic idea) and a graphical interface (borrowing from contemporary UI design). Elon Musk’s SpaceX innovated rocketry largely by reusing and iterating on NASA’s prior designs (Merlin engines trace lineage to Apollo-era designs) but with modern materials and an aggressive test-learn approach – essentially applying Silicon Valley iteration discipline to aerospace. In each case, the innovator had profound respect for the past – they studied it intently – and then had the audacity to add something new. Disciplined imitation enabled genuine novelty.
Girard would likely point out that mimetic desire was a driving force too: the innovator wanted to emulate the success or vision of a model. For instance, many entrepreneurs in social media were driven by Facebook’s success – they imitated aspects of it hoping to capture similar glory. This sometimes leads to clones, but occasionally someone introduces a twist that opens a new niche (e.g. Instagram focused on photos in a way Facebook hadn’t – still an imitation of the social network model at core, but a novel emphasis). The competitive dynamic in markets – firms watching each other, leapfrogging features – is exactly what Girard describes as internal mediation: rivals who share the same goals and end up copying each other in a feedback loop. Often, this dynamic is productive: each company’s improvement forces the others to improve. Just look at the smartphone race – every generation sees Apple, Samsung, Google, etc. borrowing each other’s innovations (multi-lens cameras, face recognition, app store designs), and then trying to outdo them. Consumers benefit from this mimetic competition with ever better phones. However, internal mediation can also become self-destructive if it turns into a fixation on beating the rival rather than serving the customer – e.g., companies sometimes add gimmicky features just because “we need to have something new that our competitor doesn’t,” leading to bloated products. The difference between healthy and unhealthy mimetic competition lies in whether one maintains a clear value criterion (Lonergan’s judgment: is this truly better?) or gets swept up in rivalry for rivalry’s sake.
In cultural innovation, the same interplay shows up. Think of genres of music evolving: an upstart artist imitates the greats to learn technique, then blends styles or adds their personal flair – a new genre emerges. Others then imitate that pioneer, and so on. Or consider startups in an accelerator: they cross-pollinate ideas (often inadvertently copying each other’s jargon or business models). Sometimes you get many shallow copies (e.g. the glut of “Uber for X” startups at one point), but sometimes one team uses that shared pool of ideas and, through disciplined iteration, finds a breakthrough application.
The key lesson is that imitation per se is not the enemy of innovation – uncritical imitation is. What we want is critical, selective, and passionate imitation. That means imitating with eyes wide open: acknowledging the influence, studying it deeply (passionately), but also thinking critically about how to go beyond it. It’s akin to how scientific progress works – new theories honor and incorporate the valid parts of old theories while introducing new hypotheses. Einstein’s Relativity didn’t discard Newtonian mechanics outright; it built on it for a new domain. Likewise, a startup should honor what existing solutions get right and innovate where they fall short. This attitude also keeps innovators humble and collegial – rather than pretending to be isolated geniuses, they become part of a continuum of development.
Beyond the Idol of Originality: Toward a Mature Mimetic Innovation
In a culture that loves the myth of the lone visionary, it’s a refreshing dose of realism to recognize that all innovation is, at root, mimetic. We desire to create the new because we see something others have – a success, a capability, a status – and we want to rival or emulate it. Rather than deny this, we should channel it constructively. The idolization of originality for its own sake is misguided. It tempts us to disavow our influences (leading either to plagiarism with a pretentious paint job, or to needless wheel-reinvention). It can foster what Girard calls “romantic lie” – the false notion that the best creations come from absolute independence. On the contrary, history and experience show the best creations come from interdependence: minds building on other minds, ideas spawning from cross-pollination, innovators standing on “the shoulders of giants” as Newton famously said. Originality is real and valuable, but it is emergent – the outcome of a process, not the starting command.
A mature model of innovation acknowledges this. It would encourage upcoming innovators to apprentice themselves to past masters, to respect the achievements of those who came before, and to learn the rules before bending or breaking them. It would teach that creativity is a discipline – one that thrives on large inputs of inspiration and methodical cycles of trial and error. It would remove the stigma from imitation: copying the essence of something valuable is often the first step to making something even better. As Girard keenly observed, “Tradition can only be successfully challenged from the inside.” You have to love and internalize a field to truly revolutionize it. Many of the greatest innovators – from Leonardo da Vinci (who slavishly copied his teacher Verrocchio’s drawings in youth) to Picasso (who copied African masks and classical paintings as he developed Cubism) to modern tech leaders – began as excellent imitators before they became trailblazers. We should celebrate that trajectory instead of hiding it.
At the same time, a mimetic model of innovation does not mean mere copy-paste duplication or staying stuck in the past. It’s about iterating forward: each iteration takes what was already good and tweaks it in response to new questions and needs. Jeremy Utley’s Ideaflow gives a very actionable template for this: generate lots of ideas (many of which will riff off existing ones), prototype and test them rigorously, keep what works, discard what doesn’t, and repeat. This is an ongoing dance of sameness and difference. It’s iterative in the engineering sense and in the Girardian sense of repetition with variation. If we institutionalize that approach – in companies, in education, in our personal creative habits – we demystify innovation. We stop seeing it as a rare gift of genius and recognize it as a cultivable process, accessible to anyone willing to put in the work of learning and experimenting. That is an empowering message.
Finally, embracing a mimetic approach to innovation also guards against some pitfalls of modern competitive markets. It reminds us that competition doesn’t have to be a zero-sum fight to be the sole “innovator.” Instead, if everyone acknowledges imitation, there can be a healthier ecosystem of mutual learning. For example, open-source software thrives on this principle: people share their code (inviting imitation) and collectively improve it, leading to innovations that no lone coder could have achieved. In business, when companies aren’t ashamed to adopt each other’s good ideas, industry standards emerge that raise the baseline for all – while each firm can still differentiate on top. The world of venture capital and startups, of course, will still reward the “first” to do something, but even first-movers succeed because they integrated prior insights. A mimetic mindset would encourage startups to be less secretive or arrogant about influences, and more focused on execution and problem-solving. It also tempers the destructive side of mimetic rivalry – the part where pride and envy can lead companies to pursue products that exist only to one-up competitors rather than to serve customers. When originality is not idolized, companies can instead ask, “What can we learn (or outright copy) from our competitor that users clearly like, and then how can we add our own twist that aligns with our strengths?” There’s no shame in that; as Instagram’s VP of Product said about cloning Snapchat, it’s simply fulfilling a need users have. The result was beneficial to millions of users, and Snapchat, in turn, had to innovate further to differentiate – a fair mimetic exchange.
In closing, let’s reclaim the older sense of innovare – not as a break with the past, but as a renewal from within. Innovation should be seen as a cycle of renewal: each new solution grows out of the soil of previous solutions, like a healthy plant with deep roots. If we nourish those roots – through knowledge, tradition, and yes, imitation – our innovative ideas will grow more robust and bear richer fruit. By contrast, tearing out roots in the pursuit of appearing completely original will likely leave our ideas drifting and fragile. The future belongs to those who can marry the wisdom of repetition with the daring of innovation. As Girard sagely noted, “The main prerequisite for real innovation is a minimal respect for the past, and a mastery of its achievements.” With Lonergan’s framework to guide our knowing and Utley’s practices to guide our creating, we can fulfill that prerequisite – and then push beyond it. The goal is not to worship novelty for novelty’s sake, but to deliver meaningful advances that stick. And those stick best when anchored by all that came before.
Innovation, at its heart, is a team sport played across generations. By abandoning the idol of absolute originality, we make space to consciously borrow, build, and innovate together. That, ultimately, is how humanity moves forward – not in isolation, but in imitation and iteration, again and again.
Sources:
Girard, René. “Innovation and Repetition.” (1990).
Lonergan, Bernard. Method in Theology – Cognitional theory summarized.
Utley, Jeremy & Klebahn, Perry. Ideaflow: The Only Business Metric That Matters. (2022).
TechCrunch – J. Constine, “Instagram on copying Snapchat…,” 2017.
CreativityClasses.com – “Good artists copy, great artists steal” (Steve Jobs/Xerox).