The story goes that Archimedes got into the bath one day, saw the water level rise and understood that the volume of water displaced must be equal to the volume of the part of his body he had submerged and thus he shouted “Eureka” before running naked through the streets of Syracuse. Similarly Newton’s theory of gravity has been attributed to the moment when he was sat under a tree and an apple fell on his head, in what was essentially his own ‘Eureka’ moment. In common conversation today we have many words to describe this sudden moment of clarity when an idea comes to you – epiphany, flash, eureka and the ‘lightbulb’ moment. But a little more research on Newton’s theory of gravity shows that he had in fact been working on this for two decades, that the falling apple moment may merely have been nothing more than the final missing piece of the puzzle. So where do big, world-altering ideas come from? Are they the result of years of hard work, or as instantaneous as a falling apple?

Author Steven Thompson looks to answer the question of ‘Where Good Ideas Come From’ in his TED talk, filmed in Oxford in July of last year. By looking at innovations over the years and looking for recurring patterns Thompson reached the conclusion that ideas rarely come in the instantaneous eureka moment, instead they are the process of a jigsaw puzzle within the brain that eventually becomes completed. An idea is formed as a network within the brain, neurons fire together in a way that they never have before helping round out those thoughts in the back of your head.

The next point Thompson progresses to is considering the environments that nurture these ideas. He believes that the notion of the great man sat in his library or laboratory studiously working away until he gets the lightbulb moment to be a myth. Thompson cites a man called Kevin Dunbar who decided to film people at work in a number of laboratories around the world to see where they get their ideas. The most important ideas did not occur when staring into the microscope or sat at their computer, instead they came at the weekly meeting sat around a conference table with their colleagues. They shared their findings and their mistakes in an environment Thompson brands the ‘liquid network’. These ideas bounce around off people with different special areas of interest and fresh perspectives, and this in turn led to the breakthroughs.

We live in an age when ideas are protected, held under lock and key, fearful of them being stolen. But the message from Steven Thompson is that instead we should share these ideas. Much like the way it took a number of people working on the Internet and seeing different applications for it until we have ended up with the World Wide Web, as we know it today, ideas shouldn’t be hoarded.

To quote Steven Thompson “This is how innovation happens. Chance favours the connected mind”.