The BBC headline was enough to intrigue me: “Hawaiian pizza inventor Sam Panopoulos dies aged 83.” Being a fan of pineapple—and curious about inventors—I wanted to know more. Just how did canned pineapple find its way to become a pizza topping?
The art of combination is common in creativity. Take chocolate, for instance. Chocolate and peanut butter. Chocolate chips and cookies. Adding chocolate syrup to strawberries.
Chocolate is easy, though, with so many people liking it.
Think of other everyday combinations that likely go unnoticed. Putting ice cream on a cone. Adding a radio to a car. Having a bank in a supermarket. Shopping for clothes at an airport.
Combining previously unconnected things is the seat of creativity. “Every creative idea,” Henry (2013) wrote,” is the combination of previously existing ideas, or bits of stimuli, into something new” (p. 137).
Those “bits” of pineapple from a can transformed Panopoulos’ pizza. Combined with ham, the Hawaiian pizza was born from testing things out in his restaurant in Canada. “We just put it on, just for the fun of it, see how it was going to taste,” he said in a BBC interview. The entrepreneurial spirit in Panopoulos came through clearly. “We were young in the business and we were doing a lot of experiments,” he added. With customers liking what they tasted, the Hawaiian pizza hit the menu in the ensuing weeks.
Warning: Some people may not like the combination. Pushback can ensue.
That’s right, not everyone was fond of the notion of the pineapple topping…not in 1962, the year that Panopoulos “invented” Hawaiian pizza, or even years later.
In 2017, the president of Iceland visited a high school and fielded questions from students. When the topic of pizza came up, he told them that he would be in favor of banning pineapple from pizza if he could. The comment hit news sites and social media, and the pizza furor over pineapples erupted once again about its legitimate place among pepperoni, bacon, and mushrooms.
Yet the art of combining the previously uncombined extends beyond just things. Michalko (2006) offered other ideas to spark creativity: combining different fields, combining problems, and bringing together various domains. According to Michalko, Edison’s lab was actually a large barn that had space for multiple projects simultaneously.
The effect? It enabled him to permit one project to “infect a neighboring one,” thereby helping him to rethink his approaches to his various activities (p. 336). The art of unrelated ideas brought together can help in reshaping and reinvigorating thinking.
The idea of mixing previously uncombined things is fundamental to creativity. Pineapples and pizza? Thank you for this slice of innovation, Mr. Panopoulos.
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