Ideation by building on pre-existing ideas

The phrase "Standing on the shoulders of giants" expresses the meaning of "discovering truth by building on previous discoveries", a notion made famous by Isaac Newton in 1675: "If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants". Now, in everyday language, truth is typically ascribed to things that aim to represent reality or otherwise correspond to it, such as beliefs and propositions. Moreover, most commonly, truth is viewed as the correspondence of language or thought to a mind-independent world. An idea, then, as an element of thought, and as a proposition aiming at representing reality may amount to discovering truth too. Thus, in the context of ideation, the process of discovering truth by building on previos discoveries, would translate into generating ideas by building on previous, or pre-existing ideas. That is, most ideas, if not all, are combinations, or re-arrangements of pre-existing ideas. In short, today's ideators are producing "new" ideas by standing on the shoulders of ideators who came before. Practically speaking, then, ideators, to see further engage in creative activities such as the ideation workshop, or building ideas through research, experimentation and serious playfulness. Source: Wikipedia.