Where Good Ideas Come From

Go for a walk; cultivate hunches; write everything down, but keep your folders messy; embrace serendipity; make generative mistakes; take on multiple hobbies; frequent coffeehouses and other liquid networks; follow the links; let others build on your ideas; borrow, recycle, reinvent. Build a tangled bank.

Ideas rise in crowds. They rise in liquid networks where connection is valued more than protection. So if we want to build environments that generate good ideas-whether those environments are in schools or corporations or governments or our own personal lives we need to keep that history in mind, and not fall back on the easy assumptions that competitive markets are the only reliable source of good ideas.

Apple calls it concurrent or parallel production. All the groups— design, manufacturing, engineering, sales meet continuously through the product-development cycle, brainstorming, trading ideas and solutions, strategizing over the most pressing issues, and generally keeping the conversation open to a diverse group of per-spectives. The process is noisy and involves far more open-ended and contentious meetings than traditional production cycles— and far more dialogue between people versed in different disciplines,

The most creative individuals in Ruef's survey consistently had broad social networks that extended outside their organization and involved people from diverse fields of expertise. Diverse, horizontal social networks, in Ruef's analysis, were three times more innovative than uniform, vertical networks.

"all decisive events in the history of scientific thought can be described in terms of mental cross-fertilization between different disciplines." Concepts from one domain migrate to another as a kind of structuring metaphor, thereby unlocking some secret door that had long been hidden from view.