Copy, Paste: a limitation to innovation or the way to innovate?

In our book, Anca and I note that copying and pasting are features of today's media for writing, in particular word processors, that limit our creativity and ability to think. Indeed, as one person working in an ad agency remarked, people tend to be less analytical and less creative, because most of the time they just copy /cut and paste, reproducing similar ideas, or chunk of ideas, instead of questioning things and "starting from scratch". Hence, documents and presentations were only re-composition of previous ideas. While I told her that one could always ignore the feature, she replied with a strong technological determinism, that people had the features, so they [had to] use it.

Today, I was writing an article on innovation entitled  Copy, Paste, and Innovate and of course, the title caught my attention. How copy and paste could lead to innovation?

 Here is how the article started:
"One of the most common operations performed on a computer is copy and paste. We copy a section of a webpage and paste it into a document. We take it for granted. We grab an idea from one place and put it to use in another. So why not use this method for your next product or service innovation?"

So is copy and paste, the way to go for innovation?

Copy and paste in the article did not mean "reproduction" but translation. Indeed what mattered was not so much the reproduction than the de-contextualization and re-contextualization in another field, what some scholars called boundary spanning or others technology brokering. Hence, the author of the article concludes: "When looking for ideas for improvements or innovations don’t just look at other organizations in your field. Look in entirely different arenas – the arts, entertainment, military, medicine, education, the natural world and so on".

Cut and paste in this article is not about writing or communication in general. It is an analogy inviting people to translate ideas from one field to another, or in other words, inviting people to try to to address different audiences. By imagining and addressing different audiences with different contexts, practices and problems, one might come up with an innovative solution.

I will argue that in fact, as highlighted in our book, taking the time of writing, which involves starting from scratch, is key in allowing you to think of problems differently and to even be inspired by other fields. And, of course, copy and paste is a great feature and we all find it so convenient. Yet, it should not become a way of thinking.