∎ Where Good Ideas Come From- The Natural History of Innovation - Johnson - 2011 - Reading Session 202408121058
Annotations of ð– « Where Good Ideas Come From- The Natural History of Innovation - Johnson - 2011 from 20240812 at 10:58
The secret to organizational inspiration is to build information networks that allow hunches to persist and disperse and recombine. Instead of cloistering your hunches in brainstorm sessions or R&D labs, create an environment where brainstorming is something that is constantly running in the background, throughout the organiza tion, a collective version of the 20-percent-time concept that proved so successful for Google and 3M.
A decent premise for a design principle.
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One way to do this is to create an open database of hunches, the Web 2.0 version of the traditional suggestion box. A public hunch database makes every passing idea visible to everyone else in the organization, not just management. Other employees can comment or expand on those ideas, connecting them with their own hunches about new products or priorities
Crowdsolving platforms are a modern version of this, but I’m not sure they’re proving the utility of the concept.
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Johnson concludes with two vaguely-described mechanisms for organizational serendipity: (1) a semantic similarity index of all the work everyone is doing, so that efforts on one project might show up to another tangentially-related but organizationally-distinct project; and (2) a crowdsolving platform for ideas. These are regrettably kind of weak. We now know much more about serendipity and its enablers and inhibitors, and they go far beyond this kind of shallow platform-based solution: instead they address culture and power.