Minotaur Concepts: On the danger of combining concepts from different worldviews, transforming them into battlegrounds.

A way to foster creativity in engineering, literature, innovation, philosophy, and organizational theory is to combine ideas and concepts from different domains and theories. However, we are missing that a concept is not innocent - each concept springs from a theory representing a worldview. When invoked, a concept doesn't come alone; it comes with its family, the baggage of meaning, and the entire worldview that gave birth to it. When we combine incompatible worldviews, we can create hideousness, struggles, or explosions - in other words, Minotaur concepts. We illustrate this idea by analyzing the misfit combination of the concept of Legitimation, representing the Stability paradigm, with the concept of Change, representing the Instability/Uncertainty paradigm.