For the past five years,
I've been investigating this question
of where good ideas come from.
It's a kind of problem, I think,
all of us are intrinsically interested in.
We want to be more creative.
We want to come up with better ideas.
We want our organisations to be more innovative.
I've looked at this problem from an environmental perspective.
What are the spaces that have historically lead to unusual rates of creativity and innovation?
And what I've found, in all this systems, there are these recurring patterns, that you see
again and again,
that are crucial to creating environments that are unusually innovative.
One pattern, I call the "slow hunch".
That breakthrough ideas almost never come in a moment of great insight.
In a sudden stroke of inspiration.
Most important ideas take a long time to evolve
and they spend a long time dormant,
in the background.
It isn't until the ideas have two or three years,
sometimes ten or twenty years, to mature
that it suddenly becomes acessible to you,
and useful to you, in a certain way.
And this is, partially, because good ideas
come from the collision between smaller hunches,
so that they form something bigger than themselves.
So you see a lot, in the history of innovation,
cases of someone who has half of an idea.
There's a great story about the invention
of the World Wide Web by Tim Berners-Lee.
This is a project that Berners-Lee worked on for ten years.
But when he started, he didn't have a full vision of this new medium he was going to invent.
He started working on one project, as a side-project to help him organize his own data.
He scrapped that after a couple of years,
and he started working on another thing.
And only after about ten years to the full vision of the web come into being
That is, more often that not,
how ideas happen.
They need time to incubate.
And they spend a lot of time in this 'partial hunch' form.
The other thing that's important,
when you think about ideas this way,
is that when ideas take form in this 'hunch' state,
they need to collide with other hunches.
Often times, the thing that turns a hunch in a real breakthrough is another hunch
that's lurking in someboby else's mind.
And you have to figure out a way to create systems
that allow those hunches to come together and turn into something bigger
than the sum of their parts.
That's why, for instance, the Coffee House in the age of the Enlightenment
Or the Parisian Salons of Modernism, were such engines of creativity.
Because they created a space where ideas could mingle
and swap
and create new forms.
When you look at the problem of innovation from this perspective,
it sheds a lot of important light on a debate we've been having recently
about what the Internet is doing to our brains.
Are we getting overwhelmed with an always connected, multi-tasking lifestyle?
And is this gonna lead to less sophisticated thoughts
as we move away from the slower, deeper, contemplative
state of reading, for instance?
Obviously, I'm a big fan of reading!
But I think it's important to remember that
the great driver of scientific innovation -- and technological innovation-- has been the
historic increase of connectivity.
And our ability to reach out and exchange ideas with other people.
And to borrow other people's hunches
and combine them with our hunches
and turn them into something new.
That really has, I think, been --more than anything else-- the primary engine
of creativity and innovation over the last 600 or 700 years.
And so, yes, it's true we're more distracted.
But what has happened, that is really miraculous and marvelous, over the last fifteen years
is that we have so many ways to connect.
And so many new ways to reach out and find other people
who have that missing piece that will complete the idea we're working on.
Or to stumble serendipitously across some amazing
new piece of information that we can use to build
and improve our own ideas.
That's the real lesson.
of where good ideas come from:
That chance favours the connected mind!