Where Good Ideas Come from

Bill Gates CEO/MicrosoftQuite good at giving examples of how you create environments that can encourage good ideas. (Source)

Tony Hsieh CEO/Zappos.comAuthor Steven Johnson argues in his 2010 book that innovation comes from the collision of ideas. This can happen when an individual working in isolation builds off years of existing knowledge to fuel his insights, or it can happen much more quickly when several creative types bounce ideas off each other in a community like Silicon Valley. This theory is one of the reasons why Hsieh decided to invest $350 million of his own money in 2010 into the Downtown Project, which is building a community of entrepreneurs in Zappos' neighborhood. (Source)

James Altucher Founder/StockPickrAlso add to this: “How We Got to Now” by Steven Johnson. Basically: don’t believe the myth of the lonely genius. Ideas come from a confluence of history, “the adjacent possible” specific geographic locations, etc. The connections Johnson makes are brilliant. For instance, The Gutenberg Press (which, in itself, was invented because of improvements in sewing looms), made everyone realize they had bad vision. So the science of lenses was created. So microscopes were eventually created. So germs were eventually discovered. So modern medical science was discovered. And so on. Johnson is a thinker... (Source)

Leo Hollis He shows that cities are fantastically creative places, and the places where good ideas are formed and developed. (Source)

Jane Root The normal stereotype of an idea is that it’s a light bulb that goes off in somebody’s head. He points out that is very, very rarely the case. (Source)