Where good ideas come from claims innovation originates in seven realms:
- Adjacent possibilities.Use existing components. Gutenberg used wine press for his printing press.
- Liquid networks. 21st-century cities and the Internet make it possible for informal networks to form, enabling idea cross-pollination/inventions.
- Slow hunch. It takes years for a hunch to evolve into an invention.
- Serendipity. LSD, Teflon, Viagra.
- (Unplanned/unexpected) errors. de Forest‘s development of audion diode/triode resulted from erroneous thinking.
- Exaption. Vacuum tubes were developed for long-distance telephone/radio transmission and later used in computers.
- Platforms. Development of TRANSIT, a precursor of GPS by Applied Physics Laboratory.