"Ideas are the building blocks of ideas"
About this Quote
The intent feels managerial: give permission to steal from yourself (and from culture) in the most ethical way possible - by iterating. If you’re trying to build a product, a team, or a strategy, the most useful breakthrough is often a second-order idea: an improvement, a repurpose, a mash-up. The phrase is tautological, but that’s the point. It’s a self-sealing claim meant to disarm the romantic objection that “we need a totally new concept.” No, you need the next concept that can be assembled from what you already have.
Subtext: treat thinking like capital. Gather, store, compound. Meetings, notes, prototypes, customer complaints - all become raw material. Even bad ideas aren’t waste; they’re scaffolding. In business contexts, this is both liberating and slightly chilling, because it implies that imagination can be systematized and scaled.
Contextually, it fits a late-20th/early-21st-century corporate ethos obsessed with innovation but allergic to risk. If ideas breed ideas, then the safest bet is volume: generate enough thoughts and something will self-assemble into value. It’s a motto for brainstorming culture, but also a reminder that the real competitive advantage is the pipeline, not the epiphany.
Quote Details
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Citation Formats
APA Style (7th ed.)
Zebehazy, Jason. (2026, January 15). Ideas are the building blocks of ideas. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/ideas-are-the-building-blocks-of-ideas-102361/
Chicago Style
Zebehazy, Jason. "Ideas are the building blocks of ideas." FixQuotes. January 15, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/ideas-are-the-building-blocks-of-ideas-102361/.
MLA Style (9th ed.)
"Ideas are the building blocks of ideas." FixQuotes, 15 Jan. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/ideas-are-the-building-blocks-of-ideas-102361/. Accessed 16 Feb. 2026.








