Where do new ideas come from?

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Summary

Studies offer different clues: how we think, how we connect with others, and how we connect with the world around us—all help us come up with new ideas. We all long for that “aha!” moment. It turns out that thinking in analogies, training ourselves to observe and notice differently, and encouraging divergent thinking all help us produce new ideas. Some argue that new ideas aren’t created but are spotted, and if that’s your take too, there’s some handy ways to go sleuthing.

Commentary from the d.school

Perspectives

A scholar’s perspective

The logic of routine work vs. creative work is that one is about driving out variance and the other is about driving in variance: one is about doing the same thing over and over again while the other one is about doing different things. That has a bunch of implications for routine vs. creative work.

The logic of exploring for new discoveries vs. exploiting knowledge is different and puts the two in tension with one another. Analogic thinking is a useful tool to get people to see the same old problem in a new way.

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Reading List

Article

Analogy as the core of cognition

Douglas Hofstadter in Current Opinion in Neurobiology, 2006.

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Our take

Humans are analogy-making machines

Is analogy is the key to how we think? Hofstadter thinks so. He proposes that “every concept we have is essentially nothing but a tightly packaged bundle of analogies,” and combines cognitive science with semantic analysis to prove it. Here’s how it works: Abstractions capture the “essence” of an idea in our mind. Those essences are concepts which serve as containers and allow us to think at multiple scales. As an example, “airline” contains planes, hubs, and terminals. The way we connect these webs grows our intellect.

Article

The primal mark: How the beginning shapes the end in the development of creative ideas

Justin Berg in Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 2014.

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Our take

Why novelty is a must, not a maybe

The “primal mark” describes that first moment that an idea is created, similar in likeness to the first brushstroke of paint on a canvas. This study explores how choosing how we start an ideation activity really matters and frames ideas on a spectrum of familiar to totally new. Creating a “primal mark” that is intentionally new and combining it with familiar content forms the most promising combination of novelty and usefulness.

Article

The Creative Studies Project

Sydney Parnes, Ruth Noller in Journal of Creative Behavior, 1972.

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Our take

No such thing as “I’m just not creative:" you can learn to be more creative and it’s been measured

This classic two-year study provided creativity training to 150 students (with another 150 as a control group). The research approach separated students into class sections to receive four 15-week semesters of creative study courses. These courses provided semantic and behavioral tests which showed improvement in divergent thinking and problem solving skills. The findings suggest that creativity can be improved through training.

Article

Entrepreneur Behaviors, Opportunity Recognition, and the Origins Of Innovative Ventures

Jeffrey H. Dyer, Hal B Gregersen, Clayton Christensen in Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal, 2008.

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Our take

Spotting opportunity in the wild: how successful entrepreneurs notice opportunities

Using observations and interviews, researchers studied 400 executives and entrepreneurs. The findings suggest that successful, innovative entrepreneurs differ from unsuccessful entrepreneurs based on their practice of four behaviors: questioning, observing, experimenting, and sharing ideas. Examples of interviews include Jeff Bezos (Amazon), Mark Benioff (Salesforce), and Diane Green (VMWare).

Article

Cognitive neuroscience of insight

John Kounios and Mark Beeman in Annual Review of Psychology, 2014.

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Our take

Unpacking the “aha” moment: how insight links to science

What’s behind an “aha” moment? This paper explores the nuances of insight, especially in light of recent scientific research that explores this question. The authors explore interpretations of insight across disciplines ranging from neuroscience and cognitive psychology, with a section on the relationship between mood, attention, and focus. Generally, positive mood broadens our potential intake of information, while also allowing us to activate the parts of our brain responsible for keeping our attention on the task at hand.

Article

Where good ideas come from: the natural history of innovation

Steven Johnson, Riverhead Books, 2010.

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Our take

Networks generate ideas too, not just individuals within them

Beginning with Darwin, Johnson debunks individual “eureka moments,” focusing more so on collaboration and context over time. He argues that the conference table at a lab—rather than the lab itself—drives innovation. The discussion among scientists, in combination with their work, is what makes new ideas possible. Johnson reviews almost 200 ideas and analyzes their origins, creating a framework based on individual vs. network and market vs. nonmarket. He suggests that increasingly networks will be a richer source of idea flow and origin.

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