The more weathered the component, the better for lateral thinking.

A technique for innovation is "lateral thinking with weathered technology"

You use only battle-tested, cheap, resilient components.

The combination of components is where the differentiation comes from.

Imagine that you're trying to create a new thing using this playbook.

One of the components you're relying on becomes more popular or gets significantly more investment.

Naively, this seems bad: your idea is now less differentiated, because more people know about the components.

But actually it's good: your differentiation was not the components but the combination.

Your combination is now more viable because the components have been derisked.

As long as your combination is novel / surprising / requires specialized knowhow to assemble, you're in a better situation.