The Secret To Innovation

According to bestselling author Steven Johnson, some of the best inventions and innovative ideas were actually designed or formed by using networks of other ideas and combining them to create new ones. He adds that what we generally think of as breakthrough innovations are, in fact, an amalgamation of ideas that have already proven to be useful in other fields and gives the example of Gutenberg who used a technology of the screw press, initially intended for making wine, to invent the printing press.

From the Wall Street Journal:

Ideas are works of bricolage. They are, almost inevitably, networks of other ideas. We take the ideas we’ve inherited or stumbled across, and we jigger them together into some new shape. We like to think of our ideas as a $40,000 incubator, shipped direct from the factory, but in reality they’ve been cobbled together with spare parts that happened to be sitting in the garage.

Johnson uses this explanation as a premise to argue that instead of putting restrictions like proprietary technologies or trade secrets that suppress the spreading of new ideas, organizations should embrace open models of idea exchange to help people explore more possibilities with existing ideas, something which IBM and a few other companies have started doing.

The problem with these closed environments is that they make it more difficult to explore the adjacent possible, because they reduce the overall network of minds that can potentially engage with a problem, and they reduce the unplanned collisions between ideas originating in different fields. This is why a growing number of large organizations—businesses, nonprofits, schools, government agencies—have begun experimenting with more open models of idea exchange.

Steven Johnson

Wall Street Journal: “The Genius of the Tinkerer”