Where good ideas come from claims innovation originates in seven realms:
- Adjacent possibilities.Use existing components. Gutenberg used wine press for his printing press.
- Liquid networks. 21st-century cities and the Internet make it possible for informal networks to form, enabling idea cross-pollination/inventions.
- Slow hunch. It takes years for a hunch to evolve into an invention.
- Serendipity. LSD, Teflon, Viagra.
- (Unplanned/unexpected) errors. de Forest‘s development of audion diode/triode resulted from erroneous thinking.
- Exaption. Vacuum tubes were developed for long-distance telephone/radio transmission and later used in computers.
- Platforms. Development of TRANSIT, a precursor of GPS by Applied Physics Laboratory.
and another … asking for it in the depths of the quiet mind …
and another … intention/belief … manifest it …
consciousness has fewer limits than we are accustomed to thinking … it is infinitely connected
Thanks Gregory for valuable additions! The list was definitely missing the Eastern spiritual touch to it!
Yes, ideas feeds new ideas, and it turns out that ideas overrule politicians, companies and many other things, because ideas are neutral and remains there nomatter what government that is in charge. Just wrote a blogpiece about that: Why ideas change the world.
Thanks Jesper for the feedback!
I agree that ideas shape the world. But the world also shapes and conditions the ideas. One can portray a rather accurate picture of the state in which the world is by looking at popular ideas of the time.