everything is a remix

creativity is the world’s greatest recycling program

New discoveries often have to be conceived initially as variations of existing things,

even by their discoverers

, because there isn't yet the conceptual vocabulary to express them.

It also helps to travel in topic space. You'll have more new ideas if you explore lots of different topics, partly because it gives the angle grinder more surface area to work on, and partly because analogies are an especially fruitful source of new ideas.