At its simplest, creativity can be understood as a process of novel conceptual combination, in
which existing concepts are joined for the first time to produce something new. My home town of
Waterloo, Ontario, is the headquarters for Research in Motion, the company that makes the popular
Blackberry wireless handheld device. In the mid-1990s, this company was a tiny manufacturer of
wireless pagers, when its founder, Mike Lazaridis, got the idea of developing ways of using pagers
for electronic mail. The concept of wireless communications was already widespread, and email had
been around for decades, but the conceptual combination wireless email was new and creative, as
shown by the subsequent huge success of the Blackberry and the development of Research in Motion
into a multibillion-dollar company.