According to the book “Where good ideas come from,” innovation happens by combining things we can see and touch today in novel ways.
Steve Jobs phrased it eerily similarly:
Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while.
I believe this because it matches my personal experience to the t. Everything I have ever “invented” (two startups, half a dozen products, hundreds of open source libraries) has come from connecting existing ideas and knowledge in new ways, all of them felt obvious while I was doing it.
“Where good ideas come from” calls the collection of everything we could (in theory) invent right now based on everything we know the adjacent possible. To illustrate metaphorically:
Imagine the current state of the world as a room with four walls, each one with a locked door. If we find the right combination we can unlock a door to an adjacent room.
That adjacent room again has four doors, three of them locked. If we find another combination, we can make it to the next adjacent room.
The adjacent possible is all the “rooms” we can theoretically reach by “opening one door.”
Notably, at any given moment, experts in their field are many rooms further down their path than you are (related: the illustrated guide to a PhD), so they have access to many locked doors that you don’t. They have more specialized things they can connect available to them.
The next obvious question is how can you expand your adjacent possible; how can you have more things to connect?
“The trick to having good ideas is not to sit around in glorious isolation and try to think big thoughts. The trick is to get more parts on the table.” — Where good ideas come from
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Default to open
Be genuinely interested
Be unreasonably responsive so you collect more things
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