Ideas are ubiquitous. They are the fundamental building blocks for all
aspects of life. Yet, efforts to use ideas as a basic unit of analysis
in a shared framework are rare. We often find it difficult to look past
the artificial boundaries that academic disciplines and specialist
fields of knowledge construct. In this book, the authors address this
substantial lacuna by proposing an intuitive theory of ideas that serves
as a trans-disciplinary basis for studying innovation and creativity.
The theory proposed shows how new ideas emerge from contexts that rely
on mechanisms, which were originally built on older and more central
ideas. It demonstrates how these mechanisms help instantiate different
perspectives on the same idea in variegated manners. By applying their
theory to a variety of bat and ball sports, the authors illustrate the
role that primitive ideas have on sports innovation, and explore further
avenues for employing the theory in a number of different situations.
This original book will be of interest to anyone who wishes to gain a
deeper understanding of the processes of innovation and creativity,
developed within a complex framework of ideas.