Where Good Ideas Come From

Nike was widening the network of minds who were actively thinking about how to make its ideas more useful, without putting anyone else on its payroll.

Another key to YouTube’s early success is that its developers were able to base the video serving on Adobe’s Flash platform, which meant that they could focus on the ease of sharing and discussing clips, and not spend millions of dollars developing a whole new video standard from scratch.

What the adjacent possible tells us is that at any moment the world is capable of extraordinary change, but only certain changes can happen.

The long-zoom approach lets us see that openness and connectivity may, in the end, be more valuable to innovation than purely competitive mechanisms.

Sometimes those novel combinations arrive courtesy of the random collisions of city streets or the dreaming brain. But sometimes they come from simple mistakes.

The idea was right, but the environment wasn’t ready for it yet.

But there’s another type of query that is just as valuable: “Someone just told me about x and I know nothing about it, but it sounds interesting. Tell me more.”

Evolution advances by taking available resources and cobbling them together to create new uses.

Call it the 10/10 rule: a decade to build the new platform, and a decade for it to find a mass audience.