There are a few key points that are important for people trying to encourage innovation within organisations:

• Ideas are networks: Johnson maintains that innovative ideas at their most basic level are the result of new, novel connections within the mind. Just as important is the environment in which people are working. Those that regularly come into contact with people having diverse interests and viewpoints are more likely to come up with innovative ideas. Innovation = Connections – one of the key themes that we repeatedly come back to here.
• If we want to encourage innovation, we need to design workspaces to support it: this conclusion follows directly from the first point. If good ideas depend on interactions between people, we need to take a network view when we design the spaces in which we’ll work. How can we regularly interact with those that are working on different problems? How can we encourage diverse viewpoints? The physical space has a significant impact on these issues, and we need to take this into account.
• Good ideas are more likely to result from slow hunches: one of the points that Johnson makes is that even when an idea seems to come to us in a flash of inspiration, it usually actually has a longer history behind it. He uses the example of Darwin, who in his autobiography says that the idea for natural selection came to him in a flash one day while he was reading Malthus. However, recent research based on his notebooks shows that the theory had been developing for months prior to that.

Johnson closes the talk with a great story – he tells how GPS developed from the work of two guys that were initially just curious about whether or not they could track the signals from Sputnik. They figured that out. Then they figured out how to use the doppler effect to figure out where Sputnik was. And through a series of similar small steps, we ended up with GPS.

The GPS story demonstrates how ideas generate interactively, and how they can have wildly unexpected outcomes once you execute them. It is a great innovation story – and it shows how chance favours the connected mind.

Note: Here’s another video that has been made to promote the book. It is shorter than the TED video, and uses a completely different set of examples. Both are worth watching. I’m looking forward to the book!