We were recording the episode on the sameness trap (S1 E1) of our podcast.

Partway through, I asked Nathan Reardon, my co-founder, to look at a table. I wanted to show him what changes when you look at an ordinary thing from ten steps up.

That table is still the clearest way I know to show how founders can borrow from another field without copying it.

Just an ordinary table. What do most people see when they look at one?

“Four legs and a wooden top.”

And you can build a business on that answer. Yes, for sure. “It’s there, there’s some business to it… The point is innovation.”

So I asked different questions. “How big should the table be? How close should the people in that table sit? … Is this a table that denotes power?”

Could you imagine a boardroom table and a family kitchen table built to the same spec? You would never do it. One is built so someone sits at the head. The other might be for “camaraderie and friendship and equality”.

Once you know what the table is for, everything moves. The size. The shape. Who sits next to whom.

Every idea has two layers, founder.

The first is the surface: wood, legs, colour, the app, the logo, the subscription.

Underneath it is the structure: what the thing does for the people around it. Who it brings together. Who holds the power. Why anyone comes back.

Founders copy the surface all the time. Then they wonder why it doesn’t work for them.

When I take an idea from another industry, the structure is the part I carry across.

Later, when we recorded our episode on agentic AI, Nathan Reardon asked me what leaders could borrow from worlds like music and consulting for running a team of people and agents.

I didn’t give him an industry. I said this:

“It is not about the industry. It is not about the industry… It is about the philosophy, which is exactly our show.”

“Finding the right philosophy around innovation is what solves the problem, not the other way around.”

Think about where a lot of founders begin. They open their laptop and look at the leaders in their own space. When everyone reads the same leaders, they tend to build the same thing.

I would rather you went up high. I call it taking 10 steps up. You “pull in 10 different sources. So you have 10 different perspectives helping you solve that problem.”

“Innovators would come from a wholly unrelated silo on that industry. And that is the reason why they are the ones who break the industry out.”

At Innovation Philosophie we call this a collision. You take an idea from far outside your field. You smash it into your problem. You stay with it until it gives you something you didn’t have before.

The fortress and the tumour

Here is a puzzle. Try it before you read on.

A doctor has a patient with a tumour. A strong ray would destroy it. It would also destroy the healthy tissue on the way in. A weak ray is safe and does nothing.

What do you do?

That is Duncker’s radiation problem. And there’s data on this, so let’s listen to it.

In 1980, Mary Gick and Keith Holyoak at the University of Michigan gave the puzzle to people. Some of them first read a story about a general. He needs to take a fortress. Every road in is mined. A big army on one road sets the mines off. Small groups can pass. So he splits his army, sends small groups down many roads, and has them arrive together.

On the surface, a fortress and a tumour have nothing in common, yet they share a structure: one force is too strong for any single path, so you split it and converge.

People who had read the story tended to come up with the matching solution for the tumour, many weak rays from different directions meeting at one point, provided they were given a hint to use the story. When nobody gave them the hint, the number of people who made the jump dropped sharply.

Read that last part twice.

The answer was already sitting in their heads. They just didn’t think to look there.

Dedre Gentner put a theory under this in 1983. Her structure-mapping account says that in a good analogy, [relations between objects, rather than attributes of objects, are mapped](https://groups.psych.northwestern.edu/gentner/papers/Gentner83.2b.pdf) from one domain to the other.

Her own example is the solar system and the atom: “The fact that the sun ATTRACTS the planets CAUSES the planets to REVOLVE AROUND the sun.”

That relation carries over to the atom. The sun being yellow and massive does not.

Now think of the pitches you hear every week. The taxi app, but for laundry. Streaming, but for courses.

What got borrowed there is usually the surface, the yellow and the massive. The relationship that made customers trust the original, pay for it, and come back often stays with the original.

There is a temptation here, and I want to name it. You read all this and decide to go as far from your field as possible. Philosophy, biology, jazz, all of it at once.

I would slow down first.

Lars Bo Jeppesen and Karim Lakhani studied open calls where large, research-heavy companies posted stuck science problems for outsiders to solve. They looked at 166 problems. Over 12,000 scientists took part. Their 2010 study found that winning solutions were more likely as the distance grew between the solver’s own field and the field the problem came from.

So distance matters.

But Brian Uzzi and colleagues analysed 17.9 million scientific papers in 2013, and the highest-impact work was mostly grounded in exceptionally conventional combinations of prior work, with an intrusion of unusual combinations. Papers like that were twice as likely to be highly cited.

When I read those two together, I land in one place. Know your own problem deeply. Then bring in one idea from far away and make it fit. One idea, on a business you understand.

Where I go when I’m stuck

Your history counts more than you think. As I told Nathan Reardon, “the way you would solve our problems is going to be different than mine.”

For me, philosophy comes first. It has spent a long time on questions every founder faces. Who is responsible? What is fair? What is this thing actually for?

Cities are next. A city is millions of strangers coordinating without one boss. If you run a marketplace, that should sound familiar.

And when I am properly stuck, I come back to one habit. Before any framework, “it is the process of thinking and pausing” that “says, let me take a step back because someone is not solving this problem from this unique perspective.”

It happens on paper, before I open a browser.

I write the problem down with no industry words in it. “Our booking software has a no-show problem” is all surface. “People book a slot and too many of them don’t turn up” is the shape.

Then I ask where else that shape lives. Who else has people who promise to turn up and don’t? I keep going until I have at least three fields that look nothing like mine.

I pick one and read about why its answer holds. Who pays? Who is trusted? Who notices when something breaks?

I write the borrowed relationship in one sentence, in my own nouns. If it only works with their nouns, I have borrowed decoration, and I start again.

And then I write one move. One thing I will build or change that week because of the collision. I sign it.

You could do the same with a pen this week, founder.

If you want more of this thinking in your mornings, the link below is where to start.

Become an Impact Maker today and listen to the very first episode of Innovation Philosophie today!

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~ Pat Villaceran

The table I asked Nathan to look at was originally published in Innovation Philosophie on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.