When pursuing meaningful innovation, the exciting thing is that you don’t need to invent anything outright. Rather, you can take the Innovation Shortcut: Seek out fresh uses and combinations of already existing components to generate new value.
As a humorous example, consider the International Date Line, and its possible use for creating new value within the office rental market. Essentially by crossing this imaginary line you can gain or lose an entire day. By building an office complex right on it, a real estate developer could offer the combination of two attractive components: An exotic, off-shore location, plus a flexible solution for effective time management.
Being in the middle of the Pacific Ocean would certainly be exotic. And on the Date Line, whenever overwhelmed with work or hopelessly behind schedule, office occupants could simply walk over to the part of their office that was on the other side of the line, and immediately have an extra 24 hours to catch up. Conversely when having little going on, they would just step across the line in the other direction, and would instantly find themselves one day in the future.
