Where Good Ideas Come From

Where Good Ideas Come From describes how the process of innovation is similar to evolution and why good ideas have to be shaped over time, build on existing platforms, require connections, luck, and error and how you can turn something old into something new.

In ecology, there’s the concept of keystone species. Imagine there’s a small forest close to your hometown, which hosts almost no predators. This is a great environment for small mammals like rabbits or rodents, and chances are their population will grow fairly quickly. However, exponential population growth among just one species usually leads to a scarcity of resources quite fast – if the rabbits eat all the plants, there’ll soon be nothing left.

If you dropped off just three wolves in the forest, they’d take care of the problem by diminishing the rabbit population back to a healthy level, and plants and other species can grow back, forming a more natural equilibrium of the forest’s ecosystem. In this case, the wolves would be the keystone species, because they are of crucial importance to the well-being of the ecosystem as a whole.

Basically, the wolves are a platform for many other species to thrive on. In innovation, the same thing happens. For example, when the GPS (short for Global Positioning System) was released for public use after being developed by the military, many products started to rely on GPS to make new things possible – car navigation systems, Google Maps, restaurant review apps, and, most recently, Pokémon Go. Platforms often lead to multiple levels of innovation too, for example after Pokémon Go’s wild success, many apps have been created to help people succeed in the game, building on top of Pokémon Go.

Similarly, Twitter could only be built because the internet existed. Now, countless apps have been built to work only with (or for) people with a Twitter account, thus stacking innovations on top of each other, thanks to using previously developed platforms.

Do you know why Google’s cafeteria is a place designed to be so much fun you don’t wanna leave? It’s so you stick around, talk with people and come up with great ideas. When creative people hang around with each other, good things are bound to happen. The more ideas collide, the more “lucky breaks” will happen, where sudden insights take innovations to the next level. For the same reason, innovators like Charles Darwin or Benjamin Franklin liked to work in something Johnson calls slow multitasking mode. In this mode, they worked on several projects simultaneously, but switched only occasionally. For example, if you work on your blog for four weeks straight and then switch to an art project for two weeks, you’ll still…