Where Good Ideas Come From

The trick is to figure out ways to explore the edges of possibility that surround you. This can be as simple as changing the physical environment you work in, or cultivating a specific kind of social network, or maintaining certain habits in the way you seek out and store information.

Coming at the problem from a different perspective, with few preconceived ideas about what the “correct” result was supposed to be, allowed them to conceptualize scenarios where the mistake might actually be meaningful.

Being right keeps you in place. Being wrong forces you to explore.

a paradoxical truth about innovation: good ideas are more likely to emerge in environments that contain a certain amount of noise and error.

When one of our peers calls the blue painting green, or comes to the defense of a suspect who is clearly guilty, he or she is, technically speaking, introducing more inaccurate information to the environment. But that noise makes the rest of us smarter, more innovative, precisely because we’re forced to rethink our biases, to contemplate an alterna

Benjamin Franklin, who knew a few things about innovation himself, said it best: “Perhaps the history of the errors of mankind, all things considered, is more valuable and interesting than that of their discoveries. Truth is uniform and narrow; it constantly exists, and does not seem to require so much an active energy, as a passive aptitude of sou

When nature finds itself in need of new ideas, it strives to connect, not protect.

The more we embrace these patterns—in our private work habits and hobbies, in our office environments, in the design of new software tools—the better we will be at tapping our extraordinary capacity for innovative thinking.3

If you looked at the map of idea formation that Dunbar created, the ground zero of innovation was not the microscope. It was the conference table.