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 on your ideas.
Borrow, recycle, reinvent.
Build a tangled bank.
… (action items for idea sparking and innovation)
Before landing on a breakthrough idea, we often need to be on the cutting edge first.
Because “adjacent possible” is the dominant pattern of innovation.
Technological (and scientific) advances rarely break out of the adjacent possible;
The history of cultural progress is, almost without exception, a story of one door leading to another door, exploring the palace one room at a time.
But human minds are not bound by the finite laws of molecule formation;
So every now and then an idea does occur to someone that teleports us forward a few rooms, skipping some exploratory steps in the adjacent possible.
But those ideas almost always end up being short-term failures, precisely because they have skipped ahead.
We have a phrase for those ideas: we call them “ahead of their time.”
And when it comes to innovation “early” means “wrong”.
YouTube: Had Hurley, Chen, and Karim tried to execute the exact same idea for YouTube ten years earlier, in 1995, it would have been a spectacular flop, because a site for sharing video was not within the adjacent possible of the early Web.
The trick is to figure out ways to explore the edges of possibility that surround you.
Today I revisited this great book by Steven Johnson, reread all my highlights, and took some more notes.
Innovation is at the top of my favorite subjects.
This book is an accessible source for innovation patterns and inspiration.
Happy reading! 📙