Video Transcript: Where good ideas come from

Just a few minutes ago, I took this picture about 10 blocks from here. This is the  Grand Café here in Oxford. I took this picture because this turns out to be the  first coffeehouse to open in England, in 1650. That's its great claim to fame. And I wanted to show it to you, not because I want to give you the Starbucks tour  of historic England -- but rather because the English coffeehouse was crucial  to the development and spread of one of the great intellectual flowerings  of the last 500 years, what we now call the Enlightenment. And the coffeehouse  played such a big role in the birth of the Enlightenment in part because of what  people were drinking there. Because, before the spread of coffee and tea  through British culture, what people drank -- both elite and mass folks drank --  day in and day out, from dawn until dusk, was alcohol. Alcohol was the daytime  beverage of choice. You would drink a little beer with breakfast and have a little  wine at lunch, a little gin, particularly around 1650, and top it off with a little beer  and wine at the end of the day. That was the healthy choice, because the water  wasn't safe to drink. And so, effectively, until the rise of the coffeehouse, you had an entire population that was effectively drunk all day. And you can imagine what that would be like right in your own life -- and I know this is true of some of you -- if you were drinking all day -- and then you switched from a depressant to a  stimulant in your life. You would have better ideas. You would be sharper and  more alert. So it's not an accident that a great flowering of innovation happened  as England switched to tea and coffee. But the other thing that makes the  coffeehouse important is the architecture of the space. It was a space where  people would get together, from different backgrounds, different fields of  expertise, and share. It was a space, as Matt Ridley talked about, where ideas  could have sex. This was their conjugal bed, in a sense; ideas would get  together there. And an astonishing number of innovations from this period  have a coffeehouse somewhere in their story. I've been spending a lot of time  thinking about coffeehouses for the last five years because I've been kind of in  on this quest to investigate this question of where good ideas come from. What  are the environments that lead to unusual levels of innovation, unusual levels of  creativity? What's the kind of environmental -- what is the space of creativity?  And what I've done is, I've looked at both environments like the coffeehouse,  I've looked at media environments like the World Wide Web, that have been  extraordinarily innovative; I've gone back to the history of the first cities; I've  even gone to biological environments, like coral reefs and rain forests, that  involve unusual levels of biological innovation. And what I've been looking for is  shared patterns, some signature behavior that shows up again and again in all  of these environments. Are there recurring patterns that we can learn from, that  we can take and apply to our own lives or our own organizations or our own  environments to make them more creative and innovative? And I think I've found a few. But what you have to do to make sense of this and to really understand  these principles is, you have to do away with the way in which our conventional 

metaphors and language steers us towards certain concepts of idea creation.  We have this very rich vocabulary to describe moments of inspiration. We have  the "flash" of insight, the "stroke" of insight, we have "epiphanies," we have  eureka moments, we have the "light bulb" moments, right? All of these concepts, as rhetorically florid as they are, share this basic assumption, which is that an  idea is a single thing. It's something that happens often in a wonderful,  illuminating moment. But, in fact, what I would argue and what you really need  to begin with is this idea that an idea is a network on the most elemental level. I  mean, this is what is happening inside your brain. An idea -- a new idea -- is a  new network of neurons firing in sync with each other inside your brain. It's a  new configuration that has never formed before. And the question is: How do  you get your brain into environments where these new networks are going to be  more likely to form? And it turns out that, in fact, the network patterns of the  outside world mimic a lot of the network patterns of the internal world of a  human brain. So the metaphor I'd like to use, I can take from a story of a great  idea that's quite recent -- a lot more recent than the 1650s. A wonderful guy  named Timothy Prestero has an organization called Design That Matters. They  decided to tackle this really pressing problem of the terrible problems we have  with infant mortality rates in the developing world. One of the things that's very  frustrating about this is that we know by getting modern neonatal incubators into any context, if we can keep premature babies warm, basically -- it's very simple  -- we can half infant mortality rates in those environments. So the technology is  there. These are standard in all the industrialized worlds. The problem is, if you  buy a $40,000 incubator, and you send it off to a midsized village in Africa,  it will work great for a year or two years, and then something will go wrong and it will break, and it will remain broken forever, because you don't have a whole  system of spare parts, and you don't have the on-the-ground expertise to fix this  $40,000 piece of equipment. So you end up having this problem where you  spend all this money getting aid and all these advanced electronics to these  countries, and it ends up being useless. So what Prestero and his team decided  to do was to look around and see: What are the abundant resources in these  developing world contexts? And what they noticed was, they don't have a lot of  DVRs, they don't have a lot of microwaves, but they seem to do a pretty good  job of keeping their cars on the road. There's a Toyota 4Runner on the street in  all these places. They seem to have the expertise to keep cars working. So they  started to think, "Could we build a neonatal incubator that's built entirely out of  automobile parts?" And this is what they came up with. It's called the  NeoNurture device. From the outside, it looks like a normal little thing you'd find  in a modern Western hospital. In the inside, it's all car parts. It's got a fan, it's got headlights for warmth, it's got door chimes for alarm, it runs off a car battery.  And so all you need is the spare parts from your Toyota and the ability to fix a  headlight, and you can repair this thing. Now that's a great idea, but I'd like to 

say that, in fact, this is a great metaphor for the way ideas happen. We like to  think our breakthrough ideas, you know, are like that $40,000, brand-new  incubator, state-of-the-art technology. But more often than not, they're cobbled  together from whatever parts that happen to be around nearby. We take ideas  from other people, people we've learned from, people we run into in the coffee  shop, and we stitch them together into new forms and we create something new. That's really where innovation happens. And that means we have to change  some of our models of what innovation and deep thinking really looks like, right? I mean, this is one vision of it. Another is Newton and the apple, this is a statue  of when Newton was at Cambridge. This is a statue from Oxford. You know,  you're sitting there, thinking a deep thought, the apple falls from the tree, and  you have the theory of gravity. In fact, the spaces that have historically led to  innovation tend to look like this This is Hogarth's famous painting of a kind of  political dinner at a tavern, but this is what the coffee shops looked like back  then. This is the kind of chaotic environment where ideas were likely to come  together, where people were likely to have new, interesting, unpredictable  collisions, people from different backgrounds. So if we're trying to build  organizations that are more innovative, we have to build spaces that, strangely  enough, look a bit more like this. This is what your office should look like, it's part of my message here. And one of the problems with this is that, when you  research this field, people are notoriously unreliable when they actually self report on where they have their own good ideas, or their history of their best  ideas. And a few years ago, a wonderful researcher named Kevin Dunbar  decided to go around and basically do the Big Brother approach to figuring out  where good ideas come from. He went to a bunch of science labs around the  world and videotaped everyone as they were doing every little bit of their job:  when they were sitting in front of the microscope, when they were talking to  colleagues at the water cooler ... And he recorded all these conversations and  tried to figure out where the most important ideas happened. And when we think about the classic image of the scientist in the lab, we have this image -- you  know, they're poring over the microscope, and they see something in the tissue  sample, and -- "Eureka!" -- they've got the idea. What happened, actually, when  Dunbar looked at the tape, is that, in fact, almost all of the important  breakthrough ideas did not happen alone in the lab, in front of the microscope.  They happened at the conference table at the weekly lab meeting, when  everybody got together and shared their latest data and findings, oftentimes  when people shared the mistakes they were having, the error, the noise in the  signal they were discovering. And something about that environment -- and I've  started calling it the "liquid network," where you have lots of different ideas that  are together, different backgrounds, different interests, jostling with each other,  bouncing off each other -- that environment is, in fact, the environment that  leads to innovation. The other problem that people have is, they like to 

condense their stories of innovation down to shorter time frames. So they want  to tell the story of the eureka moment. They want to say, "There I was, I was  standing there, and I had it all, suddenly, clear in my head." But, in fact, if you go back and look at the historical record, it turns out that a lot of important ideas  have very long incubation periods. I call this the "slow hunch." We've heard a lot  recently about hunch and instinct and blink-like sudden moments of clarity, but,  in fact, a lot of great ideas linger on, sometimes for decades, in the back of  people's minds. They have a feeling that there's an interesting problem, but they don't quite have the tools yet to discover them. They spend all this time working  on certain problems, but there's another thing lingering there that they're  interested in, but can't quite solve. Darwin is a great example of this. Darwin  himself, in his autobiography, tells the story of coming up with the idea for  natural selection as a classic eureka moment. He's in his study, it's October of  1838, and he's reading Malthus, actually, on population. And all of a sudden, the basic algorithm of natural selection kind of pops into his head, and he says, "Ah, at last, I had a theory with which to work." That's in his autobiography. About a  decade or two ago, a wonderful scholar named Howard Gruber went back and  looked at Darwin's notebooks from this period. Darwin kept these copious  notebooks, where he wrote down every little idea he had, every little hunch. And  what Gruber found was that Darwin had the full theory of natural selection for  months and months and months before he had his alleged epiphany reading  Malthus in October of 1838. There are passages where you can read it, and you think you're reading from a Darwin textbook, from the period before he has his  epiphany. And so what you realize is that Darwin, in a sense, had the idea, he  had the concept, but was unable to fully think it yet. And that is, actually, how  great ideas often happen -- they fade into view over long periods of time. Now  the challenge for all of us is: How do you create environments that allow these  ideas to have this long half-life? It's hard to go to your boss and say, "I have an  excellent idea for our organization. It will be useful in 2020." "Could you just give me some time to do that?" Now a couple of companies like Google have  innovation time off, 20 percent time In a sense, those are hunch-cultivating  mechanisms in an organization. But that's a key thing. And the other thing is to  allow those hunches to connect with other people's hunches; that's what often  happens. You have half of an idea, somebody else has the other half, and if  you're in the right environment, they turn into something larger than the sum of  their parts. So in a sense, we often talk about the value of protecting intellectual  property -- you know, building barricades, having secretive R and D labs,  patenting everything that we have so that those ideas will remain valuable, and  people will be incentivized to come up with more ideas, and the culture will be  more innovative. But I think there's a case to be made that we should spend at  least as much time, if not more, valuing the premise of connecting ideas and not just protecting them. And I'll leave you with this story, which I think captures a lot

of these values. It's just a wonderful tale of innovation, and how it happens in  unlikely ways. It's October of 1957, and Sputnik has just launched. And we're in  Laurel, Maryland, at the Applied Physics Lab associated with Johns Hopkins  University. It's Monday morning, and the news has just broken about this  satellite that's now orbiting the planet. And, of course, this is nerd heaven, right?  There are all these physics geeks who are there, thinking, "Oh my gosh! This is  incredible. I can't believe this has happened." And two of them, two twenty  something researchers at the APL, are there at the cafeteria table, having an  informal conversation with a bunch of their colleagues. And these two guys are  named Guier and Weiffenbach. They start talking, and one of them says,  "Hey, has anybody tried to listen for this thing? There's this, you know, man made satellite up there in outer space that's obviously broadcasting some kind  of signal. We could probably hear it, if we tune in." So they ask around to a  couple of their colleagues, and everybody's like, "No, I hadn't thought of doing  that. That's an interesting idea." And it turns out Weiffenbach is kind of an expert in microwave reception, and he's got a little antenna set up with an amplifier in  his office. So Guier and Weiffenbach go back to Weiffenbach's office, and they  start noodling around -- "hacking," as we might call it now. And after a couple of  hours, they start picking up the signal, because the Soviets made Sputnik very  easy to track; it was right at 20 MHz, so you could pick it up really easily,  because they were afraid people would think it was a hoax, basically, so they  made it really easy to find it. So these guys are sitting there, listening to this  signal, and people start coming into the office and saying, "That's pretty cool.  Can I hear?" And before long, they think, "Jeez, this is kind of historic. We may  be the first people in the United States listening to this. We should record it." So  they bring in this big, clunky analog tape recorder and start recording these little  bleep, bleeps. And they start writing down the date stamp, time stamps for each  little bleep that they record. And then they start thinking, "Well, gosh, we're  noticing small little frequency variations here. We could probably calculate the  speed that the satellite is traveling if we do a little basic math here using the  Doppler effect." And then they played around with it a little bit more and talked to a couple of their colleagues who had other specialties. And they said, "You  know, we could actually look at the slope of the Doppler effect to figure out the  points at which the satellite is closest to our antenna and the points at which it's  furthest away. That's pretty cool." Eventually, they get permission -- this is all a  little side project that hadn't been officially part of their job description -- they get  permission to use the new UNIVAC computer that takes up an entire room that  they'd just gotten at the APL. And they run some more of the numbers, and at  the end of about three or four weeks, turns out they have mapped the exact  trajectory of this satellite around the Earth, just from listening to this one little  signal, going off on this little side hunch that they'd been inspired to do over  lunch one morning. A couple weeks later, their boss, Frank McClure, pulls them 

into the room and says, "Hey, you guys, I have to ask you something about that  project you were working on. You've figured out an unknown location of a  satellite orbiting the planet from a known location on the ground. Could you go  the other way? Could you figure out an unknown location on the ground if you  knew the location of the satellite?" And they thought about it and they said,  "Well, I guess maybe you could. Let's run the numbers here." So they went back and thought about it and came back and said, "Actually, it'll be easier." And he  said, "Oh, that's great, because, see, I have these new nuclear submarines"  "that I'm building. And it's really hard to figure out how to get your missile so that  it will land right on top of Moscow if you don't know where the submarine is in  the middle of the Pacific Ocean. So we're thinking we could throw up a bunch of  satellites and use it to track our submarines and figure out their location in the  middle of the ocean. Could you work on that problem?" And that's how GPS was born. Thirty years later, Ronald Reagan, actually, opened it up and made it an  open platform that anybody could build upon, and anybody could come along  and build new technology that would create and innovate on top of this open  platform, left it open for anyone to do pretty much anything they wanted with it.  And now, I guarantee you, certainly half of this room, if not more, has a device  sitting in their pocket right now that is talking to one of these satellites in outer  space. And I bet you one of you, if not more, has used said device and said  satellite system to locate a nearby coffeehouse somewhere in the last -- in the  last day or last week, right? And that, I think, is a great case study, a great  lesson in the power -- the marvelous, unplanned, emergent, unpredictable  power -- of open innovative systems. When you build them right, they will be led  to completely new directions that the creators never even dreamed of. I mean,  here you have these guys who basically thought they were just following this  hunch, this little passion that had developed, then they thought they were  fighting the Cold War, and then, it turns out, they're just helping somebody find a soy latte. That is how innovation happens. Chance favors the connected mind.  Thank you very much.