Where Do Good Ideas Come From?

The Natural History of Innovation

Theories of innovation and entrepreneurship vary between the single brilliant individual and his eureka moment, and the networks, collaboration and context. We have a very rich vocabulary to describe moments of inspiration: the flash of insight, the stroke of insight, epiphanies, eureka, light bulb moments. These moments share a basic assumption, which is that an idea is a single thing, something that happens often in a wonderful illuminating moment. But in fact, an idea is a network on the most elemental level. Author Steven Berlin Johnson is an American popular science author and media theorist who examines the intersection of science, technology and personal experience. According to Steven Johnson, a new idea is a new network of neurons firing in sync with each other inside our brain; it’s a new configuration that has never formed before. He claims that people are notoriously unreliable when they self-report on where they have their own good ideas, or their history of their ideas. Therefore, he investigates the question of where good ideas come from: what are the environments that lead to unusual levels of innovation, unusual levels of creativity? What is the space of creativity? He looked at many different environments like coffeehouses, media environments like the World Wide Web, that have been extraordinarily innovative, and he has even gone to biological environments, like local reefs and rain forests, that involve unusual levels of biological innovation.

Steven Johnson is interested in finding a shared pattern, some kind of signature behavior that shows up again and again in all of these environments, like recurring patterns that we can learn from and apply to our own lives or our own environments to make them more creative and innovative. He discusses the ecological history of the reef, the sociology of urban life and the intellectual biography of a scientist, and he identifies a long zoom that he can employ in every scale, to each unique situation. The idea of the “long zoom,” is a perspective that shifts back and forth from the macro to the micro, imagined as a kind of hourglass. It lets us see that openness and connectivity may, in the end, be more valuable to innovation than purely competitive mechanisms. Therefore, connecting ideas is much more important than protecting intellectual property.

First of all, an innovative idea does not happen in a spontaneous moment of clarity. Steven Johnson takes us on a tour from Charles Darwin’s long, slow hunch, that evolved over years, to today’s high-velocity web. In his autobiography, Darwin himself tells the story of coming up with the idea for natural selection as a classic “eureka” moment. However, Darwin had the full theory of natural selection for months and months before he had his alleged epiphany. We realize that Darwin had the idea and the concept, but was unable of fully thinking it yet. Actually, a lot of important ideas have very long incubation periods. Steven looks at the most important developments in the twentieth century with an eerie regularity: a decade to build a new platform, and a decade to sell it. He calls it the 10/10 rule. The web environment enabled us to unleash a good idea on the world with astonishing speed: 1/1 rule. A key factor is to allow those hunches to connect with other people’s hunches because in the right environment, they turn into something large.

Second, we must change our vision of what innovation and deep thinking really look like because he believes that the spaces that have historically led to innovation tend to look like chaotic environment where people tend to have new, interesting, unpredictable collisions. Breakthrough ideas are cobbled together from whatever parts that happen to be around nearby: we take ideas from other people, from people we run into in the coffee shop and we stitch them together into new forms and we create something new. Steven points out that open collaborative spaces are vital to allowing hunches to mature and have breakthrough moments. Moreover, the world has to be ready for the resulting outcome, and when an idea takes real shape, it needs a liquid network, a fluidity of thought somewhere between the nebulous idea and the solid fact. It is a diversity of disciplines, ideas bouncing between different expertise, where hunches can connect and reconnect with hunches in other minds. Connecting with people who are different, who think differently, helps us become more creative and diversity promotes innovation.   There is marvelous power of unplanned, emergent, unpredictable power of open innovative systems, and when we build them right, they will be led to completely new directions that the creators never dreamed of because chance favors the connected mind.