In his book ‘Creativity’ Mihaly Csikzentmihalyi talks about different kinds of creativity.
He talks about small innovations like making up fun new words like snackatus and gorlump.
He also talks about creativity that contains innovations so big that they change a field forever. Like for example Jackson Pollock’s drip paintings.
And his advice for the industry altering kind of creativity is to accumulate domain knowledge.
Only by consuming a genre in its entirety could you hope to know where the uncharted territory lies.
Take for example the Beatles. It took over a decade of making original music before they made the song that is credited with birthing the heavy metal genre – Helter skelter.
So if you hope to push the boundaries of an art form I daresay a wealth of domain knowledge would help you do it.
Thomas Duggan 