The Reef and the Market

Philosophy professors like asking students where their ideas come from. "I just think them," students are bound to retort. "Aha!" The professor pounces. "But where does the idea of 'I' come from?"  Silence.

Much of philosophy involves trying to explain where various ideas come from. Socrates and Aristotle understood the advance of thought as a process of dialogue which builds upon the ideas of the past. René Descartes argued that the idea of God was at the root of all true ideas. Karl Marx thought many of our ideas, such as religion, are ideology and a product of power relations. W.E.B. DuBois believed that we understand ourselves and others through the lens of race and that these ideas have a contingent history. William James thought our ideas were a product of 'what worked' for us and people like us in the past. Thomas Kuhn argued that scientific theories belong to a history of evolving paradigms.

Stephen Johnson is concerned with good ideas in his book, Where Do Good Ideas Come From? There are three images of innovation that orient his inquiry. Coral reefs, which make up 0.1% of the Earth's surface but have support 25% of all marine species. There is the city, which, as Geoffrey West has shown, increases in innovation in relation to population at a super-linear rate. And there is the web, which has decreased the time required for innovating and adopting new technologies from 20 years to 2.

By looking at innovation from a number of different scales, including at the level of brains, cities, and, ecosystems, Johnson comes up with a framework I summarize in the following way.  Good ideas are fostered by:

• networks that can change
• that have some stability
• that favor chance encounters
• that embrace error
• that support re-use
• that support building on other good ideas

More creativity per capita than any suburb

How can businesses foster innovation? Johnson shows that the majority of major inventions in the last two hundred years did not happen in R&D labs at major firms or in the garages of people who later struck it rich. They usually took place in colleges and universities, or organizations like CERN. This was surprising to me, given my experience in the academy, its silos of rival departments, and its distance from the real world. However, universities do allow people from very different backgrounds to work together and to circulate and build upon others' ideas freely. They allow for experiments to go wrong and let people research controversial things.

Many businesses today taut the importance of innovation, but few allow for failure, the open exchange of diverse ideas, change, or time for reflection. A recent survey of CEO's showed that they spend around 50 hours a week working but have little time to reflect, given the constant interruptions of BlackBerries. Google, on the other hand, requires employees to work on their own projects 20% of the time. Twitter built an open API and then built their services on top of that. Apple, while opaque to outsiders, has a very messy development process where everyone at each step of the development chain is involved with a new product at the very beginning.

Twitter or GM?

More personally, Johnson's book caused me to reflect on when I'm most creative. I'm best in my sleep or in writing after having a discussion with someone. I need time to let ideas simmer, but I'm lucky enough to have lots of smart people to discuss ideas with. Johnson concludes:

"Go for a walk; cultivate hunches; write everything down, but keep your folders messy; embrace serendipity; make generative mistakes; take on multiple hobbies; frequent coffeehouses and other liquid networks; follow the links; let others build or your ideas; borrow, recycle, reinvent.  Build a tangled bank."