Fifty-two minutes ago, I took this picture
about 10 blocks from here.
This is the Grand Café here in Oxford.
I took this picture
because this turns out to be
the first coffeehouse to open in England,
in 1650.
That's its great claim to fame.
And I wanted to show it to you,
not because I want to give you
the Starbucks tour
of historic England --
(Laughter)
but rather because
the English coffeehouse was crucial
to the development and spread of one
of the great intellectual flowerings
of the last 500 years,
what we now call the Enlightenment.
And the coffeehouse played such a big role
in the birth of the Enlightenment
in part because of what people
were drinking there.
Because, before the spread
of coffee and tea through British culture,
what people drank --
both elite and mass folks drank --
day in and day out, from dawn until dusk,
was alcohol.
Alcohol was the daytime
beverage of choice.
You would drink a little beer
with breakfast
and have a little wine at lunch,
a little gin, particularly around 1650,
and top it off with a little beer and wine
at the end of the day.
That was the healthy choice,
because the water wasn't safe to drink.
And so, effectively,
until the rise of the coffeehouse,
you had an entire population
that was effectively drunk all day.
(Laughter)
And you can imagine what that would
be like in your own life --
and I know this is true of some of you --
if you were drinking all day --
(Laughter)
and then you switched from a depressant
to a stimulant in your life.
You would have better ideas.
You would be sharper and more alert.
So it's not an accident that a great
flowering of innovation happened
as England switched to tea and coffee.
But the other thing
that makes the coffeehouse important
is the architecture of the space.
It was a space where people
would get together,
from different backgrounds,
different fields of expertise,
and share.
It was a space, as Matt Ridley talked
about, where ideas could have sex.
This was their conjugal bed, in a sense;
ideas would get together there.
And an astonishing number
of innovations from this period
have a coffeehouse
somewhere in their story.
I've been spending a lot of time
thinking about coffeehouses
for the last five years
because I've been kind of on this quest
to investigate this question
of where good ideas come from.
What are the environments
that lead to unusual levels of innovation,
unusual levels of creativity?
What's the kind of environmental --
what is the space of creativity?
And what I've done is,
I've looked at both environments
like the coffeehouse,
I've looked at media environments
like the World Wide Web,
that have been extraordinarily innovative;
I've gone back to the history
of the first cities;
I've even gone to biological environments,
like coral reefs and rain forests,
that involve unusual levels
of biological innovation.
And what I've been looking for
is shared patterns,
signature behavior
that shows up again and again
in all of these environments.
Are there recurring patterns
that we can learn from,
that we can take
and apply to our own lives
or our own organizations
or our own environments
to make them more creative and innovative?
And I think I've found a few.
But what you have to do
to make sense of this
and to really understand
these principles is,
you have to do away with
the way in which our conventional
metaphors and language steers us
towards certain concepts of idea creation.
We have this very rich vocabulary
to describe moments of inspiration.
We have the "flash" of insight,
the "stroke" of insight,
we have "epiphanies,"
we have eureka moments,
we have the "light bulb" moments, right?
All of these concepts,
as rhetorically florid as they are,
share this basic assumption,
which is that an idea is a single thing.
It's something that happens often
in a wonderful, illuminating moment.
But, in fact, what I would argue
and what you really need to begin with
is this idea that an idea is a network
on the most elemental level.
I mean, this is what is happening
inside your brain.
An idea -- a new idea --
is a new network of neurons
firing in sync with each other
inside your brain.
It's a new configuration
that has never formed before.
And the question is: How do you
get your brain into environments
where these new networks
are going to be more likely to form?
And it turns out that, in fact,
the network patterns of the outside world
mimic a lot of the network patterns
of the internal world of a human brain.
So the metaphor I'd like to use,
I can take from a story
of a great idea that's quite recent --
a lot more recent than the 1650s.
A wonderful guy named Timothy Prestero
has an organization
called Design That Matters.
They decided to tackle
this really pressing problem
of the terrible problems
we have with infant mortality rates
in the developing world.
One of the things
that's very frustrating about this
is that we know by getting modern
neonatal incubators into any context,
if we can keep premature babies warm,
basically -- it's very simple --
we can halve infant mortality rates
in those environments.
So the technology is there.
These are standard
in all the industrialized worlds.
The problem is, if you buy
a $40,000 incubator,
and you send it off
to a midsized village in Africa,
it will work great
for a year or two years,
and then something
will go wrong and it will break,
and it will remain broken forever,
because you don't have
a whole system of spare parts,
and you don't have
the on-the-ground expertise
to fix this $40,000 piece of equipment.
So you end up having this problem
where you spend all this money
getting aid and all these advanced
electronics to these countries,
and it ends up being useless.
So what Prestero
and his team decided to do
was to look around and see:
What are the abundant resources
in these developing world contexts?
And what they noticed was,
they don't have a lot of DVRs,
they don't have a lot of microwaves,
but they seem to do a pretty good job
of keeping their cars on the road.
There's a Toyota 4Runner
on the street in all these places.
They seem to have the expertise
to keep cars working.
So they started to think,
"Could we build a neonatal incubator
that's built entirely
out of automobile parts?"
And this is what they came up with.
It's called the NeoNurture device.
From the outside,
it looks like a normal little thing
you'd find in a modern Western hospital.
In the inside, it's all car parts.
It's got a fan, it's got
headlights for warmth,
it's got door chimes 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 I'd like to say that, in fact,
this is a great metaphor
for the way ideas happen.
We like to think our breakthrough
ideas, you know,
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,
people we've learned 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 we have to change
some of our models
of what innovation and deep thinking
really looks like, right?
I mean, this is one vision of it.
Another is Newton and the apple,
when Newton was at Cambridge.
This is a statue from Oxford.
You know, you're sitting there,
thinking a deep thought,
the apple falls from the tree,
and you have the theory of gravity.
In fact, the spaces that have historically
led to innovation tend to look like this.
This is Hogarth's famous painting
of a kind of political dinner at a tavern,
but this is what the coffee shops
looked like back then.
This is the kind of chaotic environment
where ideas were likely to come together,
where people were likely to have 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 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,
when you research this field,
people are notoriously unreliable
when they actually 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.
He went to a bunch
of science labs around the world
and videotaped everyone as they were
doing every little bit of their job:
when they were sitting
in front of the microscope,
when they were talking to colleagues
at the watercooler ...
And he recorded all these conversations
and tried to figure out where
the most important ideas happened.
And when we think about the classic
image of the scientist in the lab,
we have this image -- you know,
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 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 latest data and findings,
oftentimes when people shared
the mistakes they were having,
the error, the noise in the signal
they were discovering.
And something about that environment --
and I've started calling it
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,
the environment that leads to innovation.
The other problem that people have is,
they like to condense
their stories of innovation
down to shorter time frames.
So 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, clear in my head."
But, in fact, if you go back
and look at the historical record,
it turns out that a lot of important ideas
have very long incubation periods.
I call this the "slow hunch."
We've heard a lot recently
about hunch and instinct
and 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
that there's an interesting problem,
but they don't quite have
the tools yet to discover them.
They spend all this time
working on certain problems,
but there's another thing lingering there
that they're interested in,
but 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 a sudden,
the basic algorithm of natural selection
kind of pops into his head,
and he says, "Ah, 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.
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 you're reading
from a Darwin textbook,
from the period
before he has his epiphany.
And so what you realize
is that Darwin, in a sense,
had the idea, he had the concept,
but was unable to fully think 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 long half-life?
It's hard to go to your boss and say,
"I have an excellent idea
for our organization.
It will be useful in 2020."
(Laughter)
"Could you just give me
some time to do that?"
Now a couple of companies like Google
have innovation time off, 20 percent time.
In a sense, those are hunch-cultivating
mechanisms in an organization.
But 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 --
you know, building barricades,
having secretive R and D labs,
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 to be made
that we should spend
at least as much time, if not more,
valuing the premise of connecting ideas
and not just protecting them.
And I'll leave you with this story,
which I think captures
a lot of these values.
It's just a wonderful tale of innovation,
and how it happens in unlikely ways.
It's October of 1957,
and Sputnik has just launched.
And we're in Laurel, Maryland,
at the Applied Physics Lab
associated with Johns Hopkins University.
It's Monday morning,
and the news has just
broken about this satellite
that's now orbiting the planet.
And, of course,
this is nerd heaven, right?
There are all these physics
geeks who are there,
thinking, "Oh my gosh! This is incredible.
I can't believe this has happened."
And two of them, two twentysomething
researchers at the APL,
are there at the cafeteria table,
having an informal conversation
with a bunch of their colleagues.
And these two guys
are named Guier and Weiffenbach.
They start talking, and one of them says,
"Hey, has anybody tried
to listen for this thing?
There's this, you know, man-made
satellite up there in outer space
that's obviously broadcasting
some kind of signal.
We could probably hear it, if we tune in."
So they ask around
to a couple of their colleagues,
and everybody's like,
"No, I hadn't thought of doing that.
That's an interesting idea."
And it turns out Weiffenbach is kind of
an expert in microwave reception,
and he's got a little antenna set up
with an amplifier in his office.
So Guier and Weiffenbach
go back to Weiffenbach's office,
and they start noodling around --
"hacking," as we might call it now.
And after a couple of hours,
they start picking up the signal,
because the Soviets made Sputnik
very easy to track;
it was right at 20 MHz,
so you could pick it up really easily,
because they were afraid people
would think it was a hoax, basically,
so they made it really easy to find.
So these guys are sitting there,
listening to this signal,
and people start coming
into the office and saying,
"That's pretty cool. Can I hear?"
And before long, they think,
"Jeez, this is kind of historic.
We may be the first people
in the United States listening to this.
We should record it."
So they bring in this big,
clunky analog tape recorder
and start recording
these little bleep, bleeps.
And they start writing down
the date stamp, time stamps
for each little bleep that they record.
And then they start thinking,
"Well, gosh, we're noticing
small little frequency variations here.
We could probably calculate
the speed that the satellite is traveling
if we do a little basic math here
using the Doppler effect."
And they played around
with it a little bit more
and talked to a couple of their colleagues
who had other specialties.
And they said, "You know,
we could actually look
at the slope of the Doppler effect
to figure out the points at which
the satellite is closest to our antenna
and the points
at which it's furthest away.
That's pretty cool."
Eventually, they get permission --
this is all a little side project
that hadn't been officially part
of their job description --
they get permission to use
the new UNIVAC computer
that takes up an entire room
that they'd just gotten at the APL.
And they run some more of the numbers,
and at the end
of about three or four weeks,
turns out they have mapped
the exact trajectory
of this satellite around the Earth,
just from listening
to this one little signal,
going off on this little side hunch
that they'd been inspired to do
over lunch one morning.
A couple weeks later,
their boss, Frank McClure,
pulls them into the room and says,
"Hey, you guys,
I have to ask you something
about that project you were working on.
You've figured out an unknown location
of a satellite orbiting the planet
from a known location on the ground.
Could you go the other way?
Could you figure out
an unknown location on the ground
if you knew the location
of the satellite?"
And they thought about it and they said,
"Well, I guess maybe you could.
Let's run the numbers here."
So they went back and thought about it
and came back and said,
"Actually, it'll be easier."
And he said, "Oh, that's great,
because, see, I have these
new nuclear submarines"
(Laughter)
"that I'm building.
And it's really hard to figure out
how to get your missile
so that it will land
right on top of Moscow
if you don't know where the submarine is
in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.
So we're thinking we could
throw up a bunch of satellites
and use it to track our submarines
and figure out their location
in the middle of the ocean.
Could you work on that problem?"
And that's how GPS was born.
Thirty years later,
Ronald Reagan, actually, opened it up
and made it an open platform
that anybody could build upon,
and anybody could come along
and build new technology
that would create and innovate
on top of this open platform,
left it open for anyone to do
pretty much anything they wanted with it.
And now, I guarantee you,
certainly half of this room, if not more,
has a device sitting
in their pocket right now
that is talking to one
of these satellites in outer space.
And I bet you one of you, if not more,
has used said device
and said satellite system
to locate a nearby coffeehouse
somewhere in the last --
(Laughter)
in the last day or last week, right?
(Applause)
And that, I think,
is a great case study, a great lesson
in the power -- the marvelous, unplanned,
emergent, unpredictable power --
of open innovative systems.
When you build them right,
they will be led
to completely new directions
the creators never even dreamed of.
I mean, here you have these guys
who basically thought
they were just following this hunch,
this little passion that had developed,
then they thought
they were fighting the Cold War,
and then, it turns out, they're just
helping somebody find a soy latte.
(Laughter)
That is how innovation happens.
Chance favors the connected mind.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)