Popular innovation thinker Steven Johnson shares his thoughts on the question: Where do good ideas?

Translation: Yulia Varyga

Over the past five years, I have been exploring a very interesting question: where do good ideas come from? I believe this problem is of interest to almost all of us. We want to be more creative, original. We want our organizations to become more modern.

To solve this problem, I decided to consider the influence of the environment. Under what circumstances were great discoveries made? I discovered that there are certain patterns that repeat over and over again and have a huge impact on the creative process. One of them I called a premonition of delayed action. Great ideas almost never come in moments of insight, sudden bursts of inspiration. The most significant ideas require careful thought, they remain in the background for a long time, they take two, three years, and sometimes ten, twenty years to ultimately bring you success and benefit. This happens mainly because, thanks to a few minor guesses, something larger is eventually formed. This has happened quite often in the history of innovation. Sometimes it happens that someone only owns part of an idea.

The story of the creation of the World Wide Web by Timothy Bernes-Lee cannot be ignored. He worked on this project for ten years. In the early stages of development, Lee did not envision the final image of his design. He started with a project that could be called a side project to the final idea - to find a way to organize data. And only ten years later a coherent vision was formed, which subsequently turned into the World Wide Web.

Most often, this is how ideas are born. To mature, they need an incubation period, and these ideas spend a long time in the stage of that same premonition. It is worth noting that at this stage they should collide with each other. Often a thought in one head becomes an idea when it encounters another thought in another head. So it is necessary to create a path that allows thoughts to meet each other. That is why simple coffee shops in the era of Enlightenment or salons and exhibitions in the era of Modernism turned into engines of creativity, they created a space where ideas were mixed and combined, forming new forms.

When you look at the issue of innovation from this perspective, does your thinking shed light on many of the recent debates you've witnessed about what the Internet is doing to our brains? Is a lifestyle in which a person is constantly connected and performs multi-level tasks adversely affecting us? Will this lead to the surface of ideas? Are we moving away from deep, thoughtful, slow reading? And I'm, you know, a big fan of reading, but the thing to remember is that the great driver of innovation has been the historical increase in interactions with other people, and the ability to freely exchange ideas, combine them with your own, and turn them into something completely new.

This is what has had a huge creative effect over the past 600-700 years. And what has happened over the past 15 years is a real miracle. We have a lot of new ways of making connections, finding people and missing links in our thought chains in order to obtain information that could confirm our guesses. This is a true example of what good ideas actually come from - an environment that is conducive to the emergence of a connected mind.

Key words: Where do good ideas come from, innovative thinker Steven Johnson, inspiration, history of the creation of the World Wide Web by Timothy Bernes-Lee

The book Where Good Ideas Come from examines 7 principles that distinguish environments that are “nurturing” for innovation. These principles are characteristic of open environments in which minds can freely collide and connect.

Steven Johnson - About the Author

Steven Johnson is an American writer and media scholar, author of the bestselling non-fiction books The Phantom Map, The Invention of Air, and Everything Bad Is Good for You. Stephen regularly writes essays and columns for Wired magazine and The Wall Street Journal, and also runs several of his own Internet projects.

Where Good Ideas Come From - Book Review

An idea is not only a great discovery in science or some kind of technological breakthrough. A brilliant idea is a new and precise solution to any current problem through the use of existing resources. An idea is a solution to a pressing problem using available means.

Principle 1: Related Capabilities

Megacities and the Internet are examples of environments that are extremely favorable for the birth of innovative ideas

Megacities are rich in related opportunities, which is at least why, despite the stress, noise and bustle inherent in large cities, this environment is very favorable for innovation. The dynamics of a metropolis are rapidly creating new challenges, but they also suggest new solutions.

The Internet is an example of an environment in which the principle of adjacent capabilities operates at incredible speed. As soon as some useful technology is created, it is immediately used in combination with others to develop something new.
The brain contains more than 100 billion neurons (nerve cells). Neurons form numerous connections with each other by transmitting electrical impulses. Groups of interconnected nerve cells are called neural networks.

Principle 2: Stirring medium

A human idea, a thought on a physiological level, is a synchronous discharge of thousands of nerve cells in the brain. To produce new ideas, adjacent capabilities must be used, and this requires that new connections be activated when the neural networks are discharged.

The long zoom method is used in research when identifying concepts requires a broader look at a problem than is possible with a deep, detailed approach.

The environment conducive to the functioning of the brain's neural networks is a network where ideas constantly interact with each other.

Principle 3. Slowly ripening guesses

Innovation equally requires the ability to create new connections and a mixing environment that promotes random collisions.

An innovation network is a global mind where each individual's individual thought is combined with others

A guess is a fragile and vulnerable substance. When faced with obstacles, it often crumbles, never turning into something meaningful. How to help guesses survive?

1. Write down.
Working with notes is a process of finding a balance between the order of notes and the chaos of thoughts. This is a dialogue with yourself, with different selves. However, these entries should not be strictly ordered, since an idea requires space to provide a sufficient degree of unpredictability for the thought to work.

2. Organize the space.
Statements alone are not enough. If your direct responsibilities are related to one thing, and the idea is about something completely different, then in the hustle and bustle of work it is not easy to maintain a guess that has been maturing for many years. But some people are lucky and have time to think about their idea.
How to Help Guessing Survive: Writing Down and Organizing a Conducive Space

Principle 4. Random connections

Random connections, related possibilities are additions, hints for not scattered, integral thought

To help the neural networks of the brain form random connections, you need to at least sometimes stop controlling the thought process: walk, read books, write out quotes and make your own notes.

It is necessary to let go of thoughts; at least sometimes stop controlling the thought process; unload your mind from daily tasks, thereby allowing it to explore and try something new in the labyrinths of your thoughts

Principle 5: Mistakes

Evolution in our world is a series of mistakes. Changes are mutations, and mutations are random errors. Modern science confirms that the diversity of species on the planet is due to random mutations with the subsequent consolidation of beneficial changes. Of course, mutations that are too significant can be fatal. Some scientists believe that nature seeks a balance between accurate copying and excessive errors. We have already mentioned the fact that the level of mutations is directly related to the level of environmental stress. A hostile external environment requires innovation. Creativity requires room for creative mistakes.

Mistakes also stimulate creative thinking.

Principle 6: New Application

This principle is about using something for other than its intended purpose, not in the way it was originally intended, that is, about exaptation. The World Wide Web is a huge field for using the possibilities of exaptation.

Fluid environments promote exaptation, which is the principle that ideas find new uses (often at the level of metaphor) in other disciplines.

Exaptation ideas are facilitated by weak ties that allow the exchange of thoughts and guesses from different areas of knowledge. Exaptation ideas are facilitated by multitasking, when the researcher simultaneously works on different topics(focusing on one) and changes working tools.

Principle 7: Platforms

What do emergent platforms built by nature and humans have in common?
1. Stack structure - last in, first out (English: last in - first out, LIFO). This principle means that you can use what has already been invented before you, there is no need to reinvent the wheel. Before the structure of DNA could be understood, Mendelian and population genetics had to come first; understanding of DNA allowed the development of molecular genetics; Evolutionary psychology is gaining momentum these days. Often the ground must be ready for a new discovery, the ground in the form of discoveries already made in a number of other areas.
2. Openness of platforms.
Let's pay attention to how rapidly the Twitter short message service is developing. The service itself has changed little since its creation, but the number of program applications is constantly growing. This was made possible by the fact that Dorsey, Williams and Stone created Twitter as an open system based on an API (Application Program Interface, API). This approach allows anyone to write an application on and for the Twitter platform.
3. Platforms love trash.
Emergent platforms love garbage, in other words, resources that are already available. The most significant resource in the city is real estate. Dear, new real estate is an unaffordable luxury for risky endeavors. Abandoned old spaces have long attracted creative people. Examples of the birth in garages of such giants as Hewlett-Packard, Apple and Google are well known.

“If only you knew what kind of rubbish…” - this can be said not only about poetry. Great inventions, creative ideas and simply good ideas sometimes come to us in surprising ways. The book “Where Good Ideas Come From” by the famous American popularizer of science Steven Johnson talks about how innovations that change our world are born, survive and develop. This winter it will be published by AST publishing house.

Handy craftsman Evolution

One fine day in the late 1870s, Parisian obstetrician Stephane Tarnier took a day off from the Maternite de Paris hospital, a maternity hospital for the poor where he worked, and went to the zoo in the Bois de Boulogne. Walking between enclosures with elephants and reptiles, among gardens with exotic plants, Tarnier came across an exhibition of incubators. The sight of chickens timidly scurrying around in a warm incubator gave the obstetrician some thoughts, and soon he, with the help of the zoo director Odile Martin, constructed a couveuse (French couveuse - “mother hen”) for the hospital - something like an incubator, but not for chickens, but for newborns babies.
By modern standards, infant mortality was very high at the end of the 19th century, even in a city like Paris. Every fifth child died before he could learn to crawl, and as for prematurely born children, their chances were very low. Tarnier knew that maintaining the right temperature was critical to the survival of babies, and he also knew that French medicine was obsessed with statistics. When an incubator was installed in the maternity hospital, where the babies were warmed using bottles of warm water located under it, Tarnier conducted a small study, assessing the survival rate of 500 children. The results shocked Parisian doctors: usually low birth weight babies had a 66% mortality rate, but if they were placed in a Tarnier incubator, the mortality rate dropped to 38%. That is, the mortality rate of premature babies could be cut almost in half by simply treating them like chickens in a zoo.
Tarnier's incubator was not the first device for caring for newborns, and the apparatus he created together with Martin was significantly improved over the following decades. However, Tarnier's statistical analysis gave the necessary impetus to the development of the new technology: within a few years, the Parisian municipality demanded that similar incubators be installed in all maternity hospitals. In 1896, the enterprising doctor Alexander Lyon demonstrated at the Berlin Industrial Exhibition the “Children's Hatchery” (Kinderbrutenstalt) - an incubator with live babies. The exhibit was an extraordinary success, and as a result, a rather strange tradition was formed of organizing similar demonstrations of incubators. This continued into the 20th century (at the amusement park on Coney Island in New York, such an exhibition operated until the early 1940s).
After World War II, modern incubators, equipped with oxygen and other equipment, became standard in all American hospitals. Thanks to this, infant mortality decreased by 75% between 1950 and 1998. And because incubators help with early life survival, their public health benefits (in terms of extending life expectancy) outweigh any other medical innovation of the 20th century. Radiation therapy and double bypass surgery can add another 10-20 years to a patient’s life, but incubation gives a person a lifetime.
However, in developing countries, infant mortality remains high. Even if in Europe and the USA it is less than ten deaths per thousand births, but in countries such as Libya or Ethiopia, more than a hundred out of a thousand newborns die. These are mostly premature babies who could survive in the presence of an incubator. But modern incubators are complex and expensive. A standard incubator in an American hospital can cost more than $40,000. Moreover, high cost is not the main problem. Complex equipment often breaks down and requires specialists and spare parts to repair it. During the year following the catastrophic tsunami in the Indian Ocean (December 26, 2004), eight couvuses were delivered to the heavily damaged Indonesian city of Meulaboh as part of international assistance. But when MIT professor Timothy Prestero visited the city's hospitals in late 2008, all eight incubators had failed due to power surges and tropical humidity, and none of the hospital staff could read the manual, which was written in English. The Meulaboh incubators represent a representative sample: some studies show that 95% of medical devices supplied to developing countries fail within the first five years of use.
Prestero was very interested in these broken incubators because the nonprofit he founded, Design Matters, had been working for several years to create a more reliable and cheaper incubator. At the same time, Prestero understood that in the developing world, complex medical equipment is treated differently than in hospitals in America and Europe. It was necessary not only to make a working device; it was also necessary to ensure that inept operation could not hopelessly damage the device. It was impossible to guarantee the availability of either spare parts or trained repair technicians. So Prestero and his collaborators decided to build a couvez out of something that is plentiful even in the developing world. The idea came from Boston doctor Jonathan Rosen, who noticed that even in small towns in developing countries, people know how to maintain cars in working order. These places have no air conditioning, no laptops, no cable TV, but Toyotas still drive on the roads. And Rosen suggested that Prestero make a couvez out of car parts.
Three years later, Prestero's group built a prototype incubator called NeoNurture. From the outside it was very elegant and looked no worse than any modern couvez, but inside it consisted of automobile parts. The optical elements of the headlights produced heat; dashboard fans circulated filtered air, and an audible horn was used as an alarm. The device could be powered through a cigarette lighter or from a regular motorcycle battery. Creating the device from car parts was doubly beneficial because it was possible to use local car parts and local car mechanics. Both, as Rosen noted, are in abundance in developing countries. You don't need to be a trained medical technician to repair NeoNurture, or even read a manual. It is enough to know how to replace a light bulb in a headlight.
NeoNurture is a clear example of a good idea. Such ideas are always limited by available materials and skills. We all have a natural tendency to idealize revolutionary innovation. We imagine how brilliant ideas overcome boundaries, how a brilliant mind sees beyond the fragments of old ideas and ossified traditions. But in fact, good ideas are based on the use of scrap materials, they are created from these very fragments. We take ideas inherited from older generations, or those that came to our minds ourselves, and combine them into some new form. We like to think of a good idea as a brand new $40,000 incubator straight off the assembly line, but in reality, great inventions are often cobbled together from spare parts lying around the garage.
Evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould (1941-2002) amassed a collection of shoes that he bought while traveling in developing countries at bazaars in Quito, Nairobi and Delhi. These were sandals made from old car tires. Although they were not particularly elegant, Gould considered them a striking manifestation of human genius and saw in them a reflection of the laws of biological progress. Natural innovation also relies on the use of spare parts. Evolution uses available resources, putting them into new combinations for new purposes. Molecular biologist François Jacob had this in mind when he argued that evolution is more of a “handyman” than a “professional engineer.” Our bodies also work on scrap materials - something radically new is created from old parts. Gould wrote: “The tire-to-sandal principle operates at all levels and at all times, making incredible and unpredictable innovation possible at any moment. This makes nature no less inventive than the unknown, resourceful genius who first recognized the potential of a Nairobi landfill.”
This principle in action can also be observed at the origin of life as such. We do not yet know all the intricacies of this process. Some believe that life originated in the boiling crater of an underwater volcano, others think that it appeared in the open sea, and others, following Darwin, assign a special role to tidal zones. Many respected scientists believe that life could have come from space via meteorites. However, thanks to prebiotic chemistry, we have a fairly clear idea of ​​the composition of the Earth's atmosphere before the emergence of life. At that time, the Earth was dominated by a handful of molecules: ammonia, methane, water, carbon dioxide, a few amino acids and other simple organic compounds. Each of these molecules could react with others.
Imagine these primordial molecules and all the possible combinations they could spontaneously form simply by colliding with each other (or using additional energy - such as from a lightning strike). If we "play God" and run all these reactions, we end up with most of the building blocks of life: the amino acids that make up cells and the sugars needed for the nucleotides that make up DNA. But you can't trigger the reaction that would produce a mosquito, a sunflower, or a human brain. Formaldehyde appears as a result of primary reactions: it can be obtained directly from the molecules of the “primary broth”. The atoms that make up a sunflower flower are no different from those that were present on Earth long before life began, but it is impossible to create a flower directly from them because the creation of a sunflower requires a series of successive innovations that took billions of years. Requires chloroplasts that can capture and process solar energy; vascular tissues for nutrient circulation; DNA molecules to pass on instructions to next generations.
Biologist Stuart Kauffman proposed calling the set of all primary combinations "contiguous possibilities." This definition reflects both the limitations and the creative potential of change and innovation. In the case of prebiotic chemistry, adjacent possibilities are all molecular reactions possible directly in the primordial broth. The sunflower, the mosquito, and the brain go beyond these possibilities. Adjacent possibilities are the uncertain future that begins just beyond the border of the status quo, the state of affairs at the present moment; these are all the possible paths the present can take.
However, this is not an infinite space, not an endless playing field. The number of possible primary reactions is enormous, but still finite, and among them most of the forms inhabiting the current biosphere are missing. The concept of adjacent capabilities says that at any given time the world is capable of certain changes, but only some of them actually occur.
The strange and beautiful thing about this concept is that the boundaries of adjacent possibilities expand as you use them. Each new combination opens up new possible combinations. Imagine a house that miraculously grows larger with every door you open. You are in a room with four doors, each of which leads to a new room that you have not been to before. These four rooms are adjoining possibilities. But as soon as you open the door and enter one of these rooms, three new doors will appear in front of you, each of which leads to a new room that you could not access directly from the first. Keep opening new doors and eventually you will build a palace.

Marcel Kinsburn

You don't have to be human to have a good idea. It's enough to be a fish.

Micronesian shallow waters are home to large fish that feed on small fish. These fish lurk in holes in the bottom silt, but from time to time they swim out in schools in search of food. The big fish begins to swallow the small ones one after another, but they immediately hide back in their holes, and yet the meal of the big fish has just begun. What should she do?

I have been posing this problem to my students for many years in a row. I only remember one student who came up with a Good Idea for a big fish. Of course, he did this after just a few minutes of thinking, and not after millions of years of evolution, but this is not a speed competition, is it?

Here it is, a neat trick. As soon as a school of fish appears, a large fish should not rush to swallow them - it should sink lower so that its belly touches the silt and blocks the minks that save the fish. And then she will be able to have lunch calmly and leisurely.

What does this example teach us? To come to a good idea, it makes sense to abandon the bad one. The trick is to reject self-evident, easy-looking but ineffective approaches, thereby opening your mind to a better solution. In fish antiquity, this solution came to our large fish thanks to some mechanisms of mutation and natural selection. Instead of sticking with the obvious: trying to eat faster, bite off larger pieces, etc., just throw away plan A, and plan B will pop up in your head. Advice for people: if the second solution doesn’t work either, block that too - and wait. A third will loom in your mind. Then the process can be repeated until the unsolvable is resolved, even if the most intuitively obvious options have to be rejected in the process of such enumeration.

To the layman, a Good Idea seems like something magical, a kind of instantaneous intellectual insight. However, it is more likely that such an idea is the result of successive approximations, as described above, in which you have enough experience to reject tempting but dead-end paths. So out of the ordinary, step by step, the extraordinary grows.

In the evolution of not only humans, but also other species, the appearance of a good idea is far from a rare thing. Many species, if not most, require some kind of idea or clever trick from time to time in order for the species to continue to exist. When the best minds, after decades or even centuries of tireless effort, cannot solve a “classical” problem, they are probably in thrall to established beliefs that seem so obvious in a given culture that no one even thinks to question them. – or they take them for granted, practically not noticing them. But the cultural context is changing, and what seemed completely obvious yesterday, today or tomorrow seems at least doubtful. Sooner or later, someone (perhaps no more gifted than his predecessors, but not constrained by some “fundamental” but incorrect assumption) will be able to stumble upon a solution with relative ease.

However, there is an alternative - if you are a fish, just wait a million or two years and see if some valuable idea pops up.

Children's question

Nicholas Christakis

General practitioner, sociologist (Harvard University); co-author of the book Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives (« Related. About the amazing power of our social networks and how they shape our lives»)

My favorite explanation is the one I tried to find as a child. Why is the sky blue? Every kid asks this question, but most of the great scientists since Aristotle have asked it, including Leonardo da Vinci, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, Rene Descartes, Leonard Euler and even Albert Einstein.

Perhaps what I like most about this explanation (except for the artless simplicity of the question itself) is how many centuries of human effort it took to obtain an acceptable answer and how many branches of science had to be involved in this.

Unlike other everyday phenomena such as sunrise and sunset, the color of the sky did not inspire people (even the ancient Greeks or the ancient Chinese) to create many myths, but for a long time there were still a number of non-scientific explanations for the color of the sky. The azure of the sky did not quickly fall into the category of scientific problems, but when it did, it, frankly speaking, attracted the attention of scientists for a long time. Why is the atmosphere colored, although the air we breathe is colorless?

As far as we know, Aristotle was the first to ask such a question. His answer, contained in the treatise “On Colors,” reads: the layers of air closest to us are colorless, but the air in the depths of the sky is blue, just as a thin layer of water is colorless, and water in a deep well appears black. This idea was repeated already in the 13th century by Roger Bacon. Later, Kepler also put forward a similar explanation, arguing that the air only appears colorless, since the saturation of its color in a thin layer is low. However, none of them offered an explanation blue atmosphere.

In his workbook, later called the “Leicester Code,” Leonardo da Vinci wrote at the beginning of the 16th century: “I believe that the blueness that we see in the atmosphere is not its own color, but is caused by the heating of the liquid, which, when evaporated, gives rise to the most tiny and indistinguishable particles to the eye, attracted by the rays of the sun. These particles appear to shine against the background of the deep darkness of that region of fire that forms the veil that lies above them.” Alas, the great Leonardo does not give an answer as to why these particles must necessarily be blue.

Newton also contributed to the solution of the problem by asking why the sky was blue and demonstrating in scientifically revolutionary experiments with refraction that white light can be broken down into its component colors.

After Newton, many now forgotten and many still memorable scientists joined the search for an answer. What could, as a result of refraction, give rise to the effect in which we observe such an excess of blue? In 1760, mathematician Leonhard Euler suggested that the wave theory of light might explain why the sky is blue. The nineteenth century was characterized by a whirlwind of all kinds of experiments and scientific observations, from expeditions to the tops of mountains to study the sky to the most sophisticated attempts to recreate its blueness in a special bottle, as described in the wonderful book by Peter Pesic, which is called “The Sky in a Bottle”. Countless careful observations of the blueness of the sky were carried out in different places, at different altitudes, at different times, including with the help of special instruments - cyanometers. The first cyanometer was created by Horace Benedict de Saussure in 1789. His device had 53 sections arranged in a circle, whose color corresponded to different gradations of blue. Saussure suggested that the cause of the sky's blueness must be some kind of suspension present in the air.

For a long time, many other scientists also suspected that some impurity in the air “modifies” the light, causing it to appear blue. Finally figured out what it does the air itself– air molecules in a gaseous state play a major role in its color. The color of the sky has a deep connection with atomic theory, and even with Avogadro’s number. And this, in turn, attracted the attention of Einstein, who paid attention to this problem in the period from 1905 to 1910.

So, the sky is blue because the incident rays of light interact with gaseous air molecules in such a way that more light in the blue part of the spectrum is scattered, reaching the surface of the planet and our eyes. Actually, all frequencies of incident light can be scattered in this way, but blue (which has a relatively high frequency and a relatively short wavelength) is scattered more than lower frequency hues, in a process known as Rayleigh scattering, described in the 1870s. John William Strutt (Lord Rayleigh), who received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1904 for the discovery of argon, showed that when the wavelength of light is of the same order as the size of the gas molecules, the intensity of the scattered light varies in inverse proportion to the fourth power of its wavelength. Rays with shorter wavelengths (say blue, indigo and violet) are scattered more than rays with longer wavelengths. All air molecules seem to prefer to glow blue, which is what we see everywhere.

But then the sky should appear purple, because violet light is scattered even more than blue light. However, the sky does not appear purple: this is where the final, biological, part of the puzzle comes into play. As it turns out, our eyes are designed to be more sensitive to blue light than to violet light.

Explaining why the sky is blue required the participation of a number of natural sciences, considering many factors: the colors of the optical spectrum, the wave nature of light, the angle at which the sun's rays hit the atmosphere, the mathematics of light scattering, the size of oxygen molecules and nitrogen, and even the peculiarities of light perception by the human eye. That's how much serious science it took to answer one single question that any child could ask.

There are a few authors I recommend to leaders (and I recommend reading everything they've written): Jim Collins, Malcolm Gladwell, Patrick Lencioni, and Stephen Berlin Johnson. The last of these authors can most likely be called the least famous of them. I was introduced to Johnson's work by one of my most well-read mentors, Reed Fahs, who scolded me for not reading his book Emergence: The Interconnection of Ants, Minds, Cities, and Software.

In short, this “emergence theory” describes how Google, Facebook, or Wikipedia can achieve in a few years what took other organizations decades (both in terms of workload and scale of achievement). Moreover, the principles described in the book can be applied to accelerate the growth of any business.

Johnson's latest book, Where Ideas Come From: A History of Innovation, expands on the ideas expressed in Emergence and debunks many of the myths surrounding innovation. More importantly, it explores in depth the reasons why new ideas die in one environment and thrive in another. special effort. Once again, all companies can learn a lesson or two from Johnson's findings to increase the number of ideas they generate, which is the foundation of company growth. As Johnson so eloquently notes, "The central theme that runs through the book is that it is often more useful to connect ideas than to defend them... they (ideas) want to complement each other as much as they want to compete."

In my community, I meet many investors and potential entrepreneurs who are reluctant to share their ideas for fear that they will be stolen. In fact, chances are high that someone else is working on the same innovation, and the person who shares their idea with the most people will get the most feedback and come up with a better idea faster. Look at your company: does it encourage hiding or sharing information? Are there employees in your company who benefit from knowing more and are therefore not interested in sharing their knowledge with others? Organizational relationships need to be set up so that knowledge sharing is supported and encouraged.

The chances of success when discussing ideas depend on the size, diversity and quality of your network. Therefore, in certain cities or environments, important breakthroughs occur more often. People who consciously choose to go to lunch with colleagues from other departments or divisions greatly increase their chances of generating better ideas. Those who intentionally surround themselves with friends with different backgrounds and interests also achieve best results. As Johnson notes, “It's wrong to think that the network is smart. It's people who get smarter when they're connected." And if a diverse group of people can meet somewhere, the likelihood of a great idea emerging increases even more. Johnson talks about the research of Kevin Dunbar, a psychologist at McGill University, who directly observed scientists to determine how their great discoveries were born. Johnson writes: "The most surprising discovery of Dunbar's research was the physical location in which most of the important breakthroughs occurred." It turned out that great discoveries are not made in laboratories, where a lonely scientist sits at a microscope and suddenly makes a discovery. Dunbar noticed that the most important ideas came during regular meetings, where ten to fifteen researchers met and informally discussed what they were working on. "If you look at Dunbar's map of the emergence of ideas," Johnson writes, "the basis of innovation was not the microscope, but the round table." So, even with all the advanced technology in modern laboratories, the most effective tool for generating good ideas is still a group of people around a table having a professional conversation with each other.

The 3M Innovation Center in Austin, Texas is one of the most advanced facilities I have visited and is specifically designed to stimulate new ideas. The main thing that all companies can use from their experience is the creation of one common space that provokes communication. This is especially important when a growing company adds another floor to its premises. Close restrooms and break rooms on one floor and make it more common for people on adjacent floors to bump into each other.

The good and bad news about disruptive innovation is that it is a long process. Shouting “Eureka!” is born not as a result of an instant insight, but at the end of a slow, winding, thorny path that often takes a decade or more of concentrated effort. You may already be ahead of everyone in your industry if you have invested time and effort in this process. But it may also happen that someone is already ahead of you by starting ten years ago. Apple's design excellence began with a calligraphy class Steve Jobs took at university nearly four decades ago.

The main thing is that it is never too late to start. Surround yourself with diverse, diverse people, spend a lot of time discussing important ideas with them, and keep going until you find an innovation that will change the world - or at least your company!