Is it even possible, in this day and age, to come up with a completely original idea, something nobody, anywhere, has thought of? Sure, though it’s tough. But the good news is, it’s possible to come up with a great idea that isn’t wholly original, in terms of all its parts and pieces. Designers know that great new ideas are often a result of connecting existing ideas, albeit doing so in a highly creative way.

The designer Jennifer Morla, who serves as creative director of the Design Within Reach retail chain, told me: “People sometimes feel pressure to think of a completely original idea, but when I’m designing, I never say to my self, ‘I have to think of an original idea.’ Really, everything you might think of has been influenced by something else. But it’s how you put it together in new ways—that’s how things progress.”

This idea of connecting things in new ways is an important theme in Glimmer and I refer a number of times to a term I really like: “smart recombinations.” This idea was first articulated by the British designer and writer John Thackara, who believes that if we can be clever in the way we mix and match seemingly unrelated ideas—What if I combine this wheel over here with that shovel over there?— we can end up generating fresh new creations and possibilities.

If you think of creation/design/invention this way—as a method of cobbling together ideas, influences, and resources that already exist—it makes the act of invention less daunting. To quote Thackara, we should not be “needlessly constrained by the myth that everything <we> do must be a unique and creative act.” All you really need, he says, is “the capacity to think across boundaries,” “to draw relevant analogies,” and to “put old knowledge into a new context.”

In Glimmer, I look at a number of examples of smart recombinations. There is the “Clocky,” an alarm clock with wheels on it, designed by a student who had trouble getting up in the morning because she tended to automatically switch off her alarm clock. Gauri Nanda’s idea was to create a clock that would wake her up and then flee, forcing her to give chase (and the creation proved to be a “runaway” success).

I also profile the guy who invented the “Wovel.” Mark Noonan was tired of getting backaches from shoveling snow, and he figured out if he could combine three different existing elements—a shovel, a lever, and a wheel—he’d have a device that allowed you to shovel without bending or putting pressure on your back. Today, Noonan has sold more than 25,000 Wovels, and it has launched him on a second career as a successful product designer.

The point is, you don’t need to reinvent the wheel—you can start just by trying to make your own smart recombination involving the wheel, as these two designers did. A smart recombination can take almost any form—and sometimes, the odder the combination, the better. One of the best-selling books over the past year has been Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (see image at top), where author Seth Grahame-Smith takes the Jane Austen classic and mashes it up with a zombie horror tale. It’s been so popular that it has already spawned lots of imitators, but those copycats are hardly worth mentioning. A smart recombination is only truly “smart” if you think of it (and have the guts to give it a try) before anybody else does.