Derek Powazek has written a post that pretty thoroughly eviscerates the idea of search engine optimisation. He starts his final paragraph this way:

Which brings us, finally, to the One True Way to get a lot of traffic on the web. It’s pretty simple, and I’m going to give it to you here, for free:

Make something great. Tell people about it. Do it again.

This isn’t just true for building website traffic – it applies to getting any idea to spread. Since the third step in evolutionary innovation is replication (getting ideas to spread!), his thoughts apply just as much to managing the innovation process as they do to websites. It takes time to do things this way, but the results are much more sustainable.