And this is what they ended up coming with,
it's called the NeoNurture device from the outside it looks like a normal thing you
find in a modern Western hospital.
In the inside it's all car parts, it's got a fan, it's got headlights for warm,
it's got door chime for alarm, it runs off a car battery.
And so all you need is the spare parts from your Toyota and
the ability to fix a headlight and you can repair this thing.
Now that's a great idea, but what I would like to say is that in fact this is
a great metaphor for the way that ideas happen.
We like to think our breakthrough ideas are like that $40,000 brand new incubator,
state of the art technology.
But more often than not,
they're cobbled together from whatever parts that happen to be around nearby.
We take ideas from other people,
from people we've learned from, from people we run into in the coffee shop,
and we stitch them together into new forms and we create something new.
That's really where innovation happens, and that means that we have to change some
of our models of kind of what Innovation and deep thinking really looks like.
This is one vision of it, another is Newton and the apple.
This is a statue though Newton was in Cambridge, this is a statue from Oxford.
Where you're sitting there thinking a deep thought and
the apple falls from the tree and you have a theory of gravity.
In fact, the spaces that have historically lead to innovation tend to look like this.
This is Hogarth's famous painting of a political dinner at a tavern but
this is what the coffee shops look like back then.
This is the kind of chaotic environment where ideas were likely to come together
where people are likely to have kind of new interesting, unpredictable collisions.
People from different backgrounds.
So if we're trying to build organizations that are more innovative,
we have to build spaces that strangely enough look a little bit more like this.
This is what your office should look like, it's part of my message here.
And one of the problems with this is that people are actually,
when you research this field.
People are notoriously unreliable when they actually kind of self report on where
they have their own good ideas or their history of their best ideas.
And a few years ago,
a wonderful researcher named Kevin Dunbar decided to go around and basically,
do the big brother approach to figuring out where good ideas come from.
You went to a bunch of science labs around the world and
video taped everyone as they were doing every little bit of their job.
So when they were sitting in front of the microscope,
when they were talking to their colleagues at the water cooler, and all these things.
And he recorded of all these conversations, and
tried to figure out where the most important ideas, where they happened.
And when we think about the classic image of the scientist in the lab,
we have this image, they're poring over the microscope and
they see something in the tissue sample and eureka, they've got the idea.
What happened actually,
when Dunbar kind of looked at the tape is that in fact, almost all of the important
breakthrough ideas did not happen alone in the lab in front of the microscope.
They happened at the conference table at the weekly lab meeting when everybody got
together and shared their kind of latest data and findings.
Oftentimes when people share the mistakes they were having, the error, the noise,
and the signal they were discovering.
And something about that environment started calling the liquid network,
where you have lots of different ideas that are together.
Different backgrounds, different interests, jostling with each other,
bouncing off each other that environment is in fact,
environment that beats innovation.
The other problem that people have is they like to condense their stories of
innovation down to kind of shorter time frames.
They want to tell the story of the eureka moment.
They want to say there I was, I was standing there and
I had it all suddenly clearing my head.
But in fact, if you go back and look at the store record in turns out that
a lot of important ideas have very long incubation periods,
I call this the slow hunch.
Heard a lot recently about kind of hunch and instinct, and
kind of blink like sudden moments of clarity.
But in fact, a lot of great ideas linger on sometimes for
decades, in the back of people's minds.
They have a feeling there is an interesting problem but
they don't quite have the tools yet to discover them.
They spend all this time kind of working out certain problems, but
there's another thing lingering there that they're interesting in, but
they can't quite solve.
Darwin is a great example of this.
Darwin himself in his autobiography tells the story of coming up with the idea for
natural selection as a classic eureka moment.
He's in his study, it's October of 1838 and
he's reading Malthus actually, on population.
And all of the sudden the basic algorithm on natural selection actually pops into
his head and he says at last, I had a theory with which to work.
That's in his autobiography.
About a decade or two ago a wonderful scholar named Howard Gruber went back and
looked at Darwin's notebooks from this period.
And Darwin kept these copious notebooks,
where he wrote down every little idea he had, every little hunch.
And what Gruber found was that Darwin had the full theory of natural selection for
months, and months, and months,
before he had his alleged epiphany reading Malthus in October of 1838.
There are passages where you can read it and
you think like you are reading from a Darwin text book.
From the period before he has this epiphany, and so
what you realize is Darwin in a sense had the idea, he had the concept but
was unable of fully thinking it yet.
And that is actually how great ideas often happen,
they fade into view over long periods of time.
Now the challenge for all of us is, how do you create environments that allow
these ideas to have this kind of long half life?
It's hard to go to your boss and say, I have an excellent idea for
our organisation, it will be useful in 2020.
Could you just give me some time to do that?
Now a couple of companies like Google, they have innovation time off,
20% time where in a sense those are hunch cultivating mechanisms in an organization,
that's a key thing.
And the other thing is to allow those hunches to connect with other people's
hunches, that's what often happens.
You have half of an idea, somebody else has the other half and
if you're in the right environment,
they turn into something larger than the sum of their parts.
So in a sense, we often talk about the value of protecting intellectual property,
building barricades, having secretive R&D labs on patenting
everything that we have so that those ideas will remain valuable.
And people will be incentivized to come up with more ideas and
the culture will be more innovative.
But I think there's a case we've made that we should spent at least as much time if
not more, valuing the premise of connecting ideas and
not just protecting them.