Once or twice a year we’ll get a customer or colleague request to help brainstorm a new health promotion service or product. It’s flattering to be thought of as a creative wellness provider and we relish the opportunity. But on most occasions, the request is difficult (if not impossible) to satisfy because the individual is looking for something “completely new and different.” The problem is there really isn’t such a thing — in wellness or any other industry.

If you look at some of the hottest businesses today, none started with something completely new or different; they all were take-offs of existing technology/services or combinations of existing products/services. Consider:

• Apple. The ubiquitous iPod wasn’t the first MP3 player on the market, but it was a radically improved version that, when combined with iTunes (also not the first online music store), caused the digital music market to explode.
• Google. A relatively late entry into web search, the founders didn’t even set out to develop a search engine, but discovered what they had built for a graduate school project was a better tool for web search than anything that existed to that point. And Google really didn’t take off until they applied an existing advertising model (pay per click) to their search algorithms to produce highly targeted advertising.

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