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