For the past five years, I've been investigating this question of "Where good ideas come from?" It's a kind of problem I think all of us are intrinsically interested in. We wanna be more creative. We wanna come up with better ideas. We want our organizations to be more innovated. I've looked at this problem from an environmental perspective. What are the spaces that have historically led to unusual rates of creativity and innovation? What I've found in all these systems, there are these recurring patterns that you see again and again that are crucial to creating environments that are unusually innovative.
過去五年，我在調查「好點子從哪來？」的問題。這是我們大家本質上都有興趣的問題。我們想變得更有創意。我們要想出更好的點子。我們希望組織更進步。我從環境上的觀點去看這問題。是歷史上的什麼時間點導致了非比尋常的創造和創新速率？我從這所有的系統中發現的是，這些你不斷見到的循環模式，對創造不尋常的創新環境非常重要。
One pattern I call the "Slow Hunch". The breakthrough ideas almost never come in a moment of great insight, in a sudden stroke of inspiration. Most important ideas take a long time to evolve and they spend a longtime dormant in the background. It isn't until the idea's had two or three years, sometimes ten or twenty years to mature that it suddenly becomes successful to you and useful to you in a certain way. And this is partially because good ideas normally come from the collision between smaller hunches so that they form something bigger than themselves.
有個我稱之為「慢速預感」的模式。突破性的點子幾乎從不出自於瞬間的優異洞察力、神來一筆的靈感。大多數重要的點子要花很長的時間去演進，而且它們得花很長的時間潛伏在幕後。非得到這點子經歷了兩三年，有時候十或二十年才會成熟，它會突然變得就某方面來說，對你是成功又有用的。而這有一部分是因為好點子通常來自於小直覺之間互相激盪而形成比本身要大得多的東西。
So you see a lot in the history of innovation, cases of someone who has half of an idea. There's a great story about the invention of the World Wide Web and Tim Berners-Lee. This is a project that Berners-Lee worked on for ten years. But when he started, he didn't have a full vision for this new medium he was going to invent. He started working on one project as a side project to help him organize his own data. He scrapped that after a couple years, and he started working on another thing. And only after about ten years did the full vision of the World Wide Web come into being. That is, more often than not, how ideas happen. They need time to incubate, and they spend a lot of time in this partial hunch form.
所以你在創新的歷史當中見到很多只有半個點子的狀況。有個關於《全球資訊網》和Tim Berners-Lee(《全球資訊網》的發明人)的好故事。這是個Berners-Lee致力了十年的案子。但當他剛開始的時候，他對於這他即將發明的新媒體並沒預見到全貌。他開始時只是在做一個附帶的計畫去幫忙整理自己的資料。幾年之後他放棄了那計畫，然後開始做別的東西。而僅在大約十年之後，《全球資訊網》的完整願景便誕生了。那就是多半點子如何產生的過程。它們需要時間去醞釀，然後它們會花很多時間處在這不完整的預感型態。
The other thing is important when you think about ideas this way is that when ideas take form in this hunch state, they need to collide with other hunches. Often times, the thing that turns a hunch into a real breakthrough is another hunch that's lurking in somebody else's mind. And you have to figure out a way to create systems that allow those hunches to come together and turn into something bigger than the sum of their parts. That's why, for instance, the coffee house from "The Age of Enlightenment" or the Parisian salons of modernism were such engines of creativity. Because they created a space where ideas could mingle and swap and create new forms.
當你如此思考點子時，還有一件重要的事，就是當點子發展成這預感階段時，他們需要和其他的預感互相激盪。很多時候，將預感轉化成真正的突破性進展的東西是潛伏在其他人心裡的預感。而你必須要找出創造系統的方法，讓那些預感聚集並變得比零碎部位加總還要更強大。舉例來說，那就是為什麼《啟蒙時期》的咖啡店或是巴黎的現代沙龍是這樣的創造力推手。因為它們創造出一個場所讓點子能夠交流、交換並產生新的形式。
When you look at the problem of innovation from this perspective, it sheds a lot of important light on the debate we've been having recently about what the Internet is doing to our brains. Are we getting overwhelmed with an always connected, multi-tasking lifestyle? And is that gonna lead to less sophisticated thoughts as we move away from the slower, deeper, contemplative state of reading, for instance?
當你用這觀點來檢視創新這難題，它很清楚的闡明我們最近一直都有的爭論，關於《網路》在對我們的大腦做些什麼。我們是否因為總是連結在一起、多工化的生活方式而不知所措？而那是否將會導致較不周密的思維？舉例來說，當我們離開了那較慢、較有深度、深思熟慮的閱讀狀態。
Obviously, I'm a big fan of reading. But I think it's important to remember that the great driver of scientific innovation and technological innovation has been the historic increase in connectivity and our ability to reach out and exchange ideas with other people, and to borrow other people's hunches and combine them into our hunches, and turn them into something new. That really has, I think, been more than anything else, the primary engine of creativity and innovation of the last six hundred or seven hundred years.
很明顯的，我熱愛閱讀。但我認為要記得科學創新和科技進步的偉大推手一直以來都是歷史上人類之間連結力的增長、我們向外發展以及與他人交換想法的能力，還有借助他人預感並結合到自己預感之中，將其化作新事物的能力很重要。我認為，那過去六、七百年在創造力和創新上的主要推手，真的比任何東西都重要。
And so yes, it's true we're more distracted. But what has happened that is really miraculous and marvelous over the last fifteen years is that we have so many new ways to connect and so many new ways to reach out and find other people who have that missing piece that will complete the idea we're working on, or to stumble serendipitously across some amazing new piece of information that we can use to build and improve our own idea. That's the real lesson of "Where good ideas come from?" The chance favors the connected mind.
所以是的，我們的確更為分心了。但過去十五年所發生非常神奇又不可思議的事情是我們有這麼多新方式可以聯繫在一起，這麼多的方法向外發展並尋找其他擁有我們所缺失的、能夠圓滿我們正在努力的點子的人，或是僥倖碰到一些驚人的新資訊可以用來建構、改進我們自身的點子。那是一堂關於「好點子從哪來？」的真正課程。機遇偏愛相互聯繫的才子們。
