By Christopher Murphy CHAPTER 13Conclusion
Ideas don’t materialize in a vacuum. Without constant input, your outputs
will inevitably remain the same. As such, it’s essential to maintain an
inquisitive mind, ensuring a steady flow of new triggers and stimuli that
enable your thinking to evolve. Widen the idea gene pool and you’ll deepen
the well of ideas you are capable of creating.
Similarly, the best ideas are more often than not the result of teams
that aren’t afraid to reconfigure periodically (either from project to proj-
ect or, if a creative dead end has been reached, mid-project, to help shake
things up). Consider the role of conductors to orchestrate teams, ensuring
they deliver more than the sum of their parts. If it works for companies
like IDEO, which routinely reshape teams to keep inputs varied, it can
work for you.
Finally, consider workspaces. You don’t need to have the multi-billion
dollar budget pouring in to Apple’s new Cupertino campus, but that doesn’t
mean you can’t put a little thought into how your spaces facilitate chance
collisions. At the simplest level, it can just be a change of scenery, work-
ing from a coffee shop, or even the park. A change is as good as a rest and
sometimes just looking at things from a different perspective — literally —
can make all the difference.
Generating ideas isn’t difficult, and if you follow the strategies out-
lined above it’s very easy to stimulate a culture of ideas. All you need to
do is place the pieces in an intelligent manner. Idea factories and creative
idea spaces are easy to build if approached strategically. The fact that they
work has been demonstrated over and over: Thomas Edison proved it at
his Menlo Park Laboratory in the late 19th century; and Steve Jobs amply
underscored that thinking in the early 21st century.