The central point, unstated here, is that we need to find ways of sparking our imagination to see how we can get beyond imitation and into innovation.
My personal approach is to deliberately master a variety of orthogonal skills and wait for my unconscious to ask “Why doesn’t someone do x?” because good cross-disciplinary ideas are often obvious to specialists and invisible to everyone else.
If you’re a database expert, don’t build a chat app for teenagers (unless you’re also a teenager). Maybe it’s a good idea, but you can’t trust your judgment about that, so ignore it. There have to be other ideas that involve databases, and whose quality you can judge. Do you find it hard to come up with good ideas involving databases? That’s because your expertise raises your standards. Your ideas about chat apps are just as bad, but you’re giving yourself a Dunning-Kruger pass in that domain.
My personal approach is to deliberately master a variety of orthogonal skills and wait for my unconscious to ask “Why doesn’t someone do x?” because good cross-disciplinary ideas are often obvious to specialists and invisible to everyone else.