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.

Government bureaucracies have a long and richly deserved reputation for squelching innovation, but they possess four key elements that may allow them to benefit from the innovation engine of an emergent platform. First, they are repositories of a vast amount of information and services that could be of potential value to ordinary people, if only we

A world where a diverse mix of distinct professions and passions overlap is a world where exaptations thrive.

The trick to having good ideas is not to sit around in glorious isolation and try to think big thoughts. The trick is to get more parts on the table.

An extensive literature exists on the question of innovation, particularly with reference to scientific and technological fields. I have tried to include a broad survey of these works in the bibliography, but several works have been disproportionately influential on my argument and method in this book. Dean Keith Simonton’s Origins of Genius and Ho

A society organized around marketplaces, instead of castles or cloisters, distributes decision-making authority across a much larger network of individual minds.

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

And so, when we look back to the original innovation engine on earth, we find two essential properties. First, a capacity to make new connections with as many other elements as possible. And, second, a “randomizing” environment that encourages collisions between all the elements in the system.

What kind of environment creates good ideas? The simplest way to answer it is this: innovative environments are better at helping their inhabitants explore the adjacent possible, because they expose a wide and diverse sample of spare parts—mechanical or conceptual—and they encourage novel ways of recombining those parts.

In November of 2007, Microsoft opened the doors to the new Redmond, Washington-based headquarters of its research division: Building 99.