Innovation can be daunting. Creating something entirely new feels intimidating. But that feeling misses a vital truth: Most great innovations are creative combinations of existing ideas. Examples abound. Reed Hastings, a cofounder of Netflix, reinvented the movie rental business by combining his local gym’s monthly membership model, Amazon’s online ordering and payment systems, the newly invented DVD format from Japan, and centralized warehousing of digital content. Warren Buffett transformed the failing textile company Berkshire Hathaway into a value-creating powerhouse by connecting three ideas: the “cigar butt” approach to buying businesses (which he learned from his Columbia Business School professor Benjamin Graham, who advised that companies with low valuations may have a few puffs of value left in them, much like a discarded cigar), the intrinsic cash-flow value approach to investing in “great businesses at a fair price” (which Buffett got from his longtime partner, Charlie Munger), and using insurance float—the cash collected from premiums before it has to be used to pay out claims—as a source of “free” capital (which came from Lorimer Davidson, then an investment officer for Geico and later its CEO).