In my time working as a government scientist, I was able to work with a lot of cross-disciplinary teams, often putting math-and-code-heavy folks like myself together with domain-specific specialists like chemists or biologists who worked in wet labs more and made numerical models a bit less. I found the power of brainstorming is much magnified when working with folks of diverse perspective and skillset, because of what I’ve come to call the “telescope” effect. If a researcher isn’t careful, as their knowledge of a subject gets deeper, it also gets more specific, and ultimately their day-to-day thoughts and feelings about the applicability of their field may become narrower. As a result, many of us are carrying around really great concepts (say, a novel way to analyze data) but never thinking about the other problems that those concepts could be applied to, because our individual focus has become like a telescope – fixed crisply on a tiny region of the overall concept space. Often all that is needed is a person with a different focus to let that telescope re-point at the new problem, and all of a sudden the power of the technique can come to bear. This is one of the reasons I’ve sought out problems that reach between disciplines.
TL:DR, a lot of the great new ideas aren’t really all that new, they’re well-established ideas that have been working well on different problems and will work just as well on yours. But often those ideas are locked away in little domain-specific boxes. Go find people with very different backgrounds and experiences and open some of them up and trade.