The hunt for creativity has become one of the hottest pursuits of our uber-connected, uber-productive culture. But while the cult of creativity often portrays creativity as a burst of spontaneous inspiration, the reality is that rediscovering and re-contextualizing old ideas is often more valuable — and more effective — than scattershot attempts to randomly discover The Next Big Thing.

Creativity gurus and researchers, of course, would disagree. Depending on who you ask, workers can increase their creativity (and therefore a whole host of other desirable qualities) by keeping toys on our desks, listening to Baroque music, regularly hanging out with sarcastic people or doodling.

Take your pick!

But what if we're thinking about creativity all wrong? What if, instead of treating creativity as a magical end-goal, we looked for ways to deepen our mastery of topics? What if instead of lionizing creativity as a goal unto itself and creative people as society’s best and brightest, we rewarded hard workers?

In commerce, companies must always consider the features of their products and services in connection with the needs of their consumer bases. As a result, commercial creators who can sort intelligently through data, empirical information and assumptions can cull novel insights and build innovative outputs without ever experiencing a surprise “eureka moment.”

In other words, innovation is not always as sexy — or as random — as creativity gurus make it seem. As the writer and biochemist Isaac Asimov stated in a 1959 essay on the process of innovation: “What is needed is not only people with a good background in a particular field, but also people capable of making a connection between item one and item two which might not ordinarily seem connected.”