If you looked at the map of idea formation that Dunbar created, the ground zero of innovation was not the microscope. It was the conference table.

Good ideas are not conjured out of thin air; they are built out of a collection of existing parts, the composition of which expands (and, occasionally, contracts) over time.

The more we embrace these patterns—in our private work habits and hobbies, in our office environments, in the design of new software tools—the better we will be at tapping our extraordinary capacity for innovative thinking.3

Benjamin Franklin, who knew a few things about innovation himself, said it best: “Perhaps the history of the errors of mankind, all things considered, is more valuable and interesting than that of their discoveries. Truth is uniform and narrow; it constantly exists, and does not seem to require so much an active energy, as a passive aptitude of sou

Environments that block or limit those new combinations—by punishing experimentation, by obscuring certain branches of possibility, by making the current state so satisfying that no one bothers to explore the edges—will, on average, generate and circulate fewer innovations than environments that encourage exploration.

Yet a number of recent studies have suggested that brainstorming is less effective than its practitioners would like. One trouble with brainstorming is that it is finite in both time and space: a group gathers for an hour in a room, or for a daylong corporate retreat, they toss out a bunch of crazy ideas, and then the meeting disperses.

Coming at the problem from a different perspective, with few preconceived ideas about what the “correct” result was supposed to be, allowed them to conceptualize scenarios where the mistake might actually be meaningful.

The best innovation labs are always a little contaminated.

An extensive literature exists on the question of innovation, particularly with reference to scientific and technological fields. I have tried to include a broad survey of these works in the bibliography, but several works have been disproportionately influential on my argument and method in this book. Dean Keith Simonton’s Origins of Genius and Ho