A few years ago, a wonderful researcher named Kevin Dunbar decided to go around and basically do the Big Brother12) approach to figuring out where good ideas come from. He went to a bunch of science labs around the world and videotaped everyone as they were doing every little bit of their job. What happened when Dunbar looked at the tape is that almost all of the important breakthrough ideas did not happen alone in the lab. They happened at the conference table at the weekly lab meeting, when everybody got together and shared their kind of latest data and findings. I’ve started calling it the “liquid network”, where you have lots of different ideas that are together, different backgrounds, different interests, jostling with each other, bouncing off each other—that environment, in fact, leads to innovation.
几年前，一名叫凯文·邓巴的研究人员决定对“奇思妙想从何而来”这个问题一探究竟，他的研究方法和真人秀节目《老大哥》差不多：他走访了世界各地的许多科学实验室，拍下了科研人员工作中的一点一滴。回看这些录像时，邓巴发现几乎所有具有重大突破性的创意都不是由科研人员一个人在实验室里想出来的，而是诞生在每周的例会上：大家聚在会议桌前，交流彼此的最新数据和发现，好点子就随之冒出来了。这就是我所说的“液态网络”，在这种网络里，背景不同、兴趣各异的人相互交流切磋，你一言，我一语，五花八门的观点就像液体的分子一样在这里发生碰撞——其实这就是孕育创新的环境。
Slow Hunch13) 漫长的灵感孕育期
Often people like to condense their stories of innovation down to kind of shorter time frames. But if you look at the historical record, it turns out that a lot of important ideas have very long incubation periods. I call this the “slow hunch”. We’ve heard a lot about hunch and instinct and blink-like sudden moments of clarity, but a lot of great ideas linger on, sometimes for decades, in the back of people’s minds.
人们在讲述自己发明创造的经历时，往往喜欢对创新经历的时间进行一些浓缩。然而，如果翻阅一下历史记载，你会发现许多重大发明都经历了漫长的孵育过程。我把这叫做“漫长的灵感孕育期”。我们总是听到“灵感” “直觉”和“灵光一现”这样的字眼，但许多伟大的创意都曾长时间盘旋在人们的脑海中，有时甚至长达数十年。
Darwin is a great example of this. Darwin himself tells the story of coming up with the idea for natural selection as a classic “eureka” moment. However, about a decade or two ago, a wonderful scholar named Howard Gruber14) went back and looked at Darwin’s notebooks from this period. What Gruber found was that Darwin had the full theory of natural selection for months and months and months before he had his alleged epiphany. And so what you realize is that Darwin had the idea, but was unable to fully think it yet. And that is actually how great ideas often happen; they fade into view over long periods of time.
达尔文就是一个很好的例子。他本人在讲述自己如何萌发出物竞天择学说的想法时，采用的就是典型的“恍然大悟”的说法。但十几年前，一个叫霍华德·格鲁伯的了不起的学者，这个人很了不起，他回过头去看了看达尔文该时期的笔记时，却发现达尔文早在他声称“茅塞顿开”的数月前就有了整个理论的雏形。这样你就明白了，达尔文早就有了想法，只不过想法还不成熟而已。事实上，伟大的想法就是这么产生的；它们需要很长一段时日才会慢慢地浮出水面。
Now the challenge for all of us is: how do you create environments that allow these ideas to have this kind of long half-life? Now a couple of companies, like Google, they have innovation time off, 20 percent time. In a sense, those are hunch-cultivating mechanisms in an organization. And the other thing is to allow those hunches to connect with other people’s hunches. You have half of an idea, somebody else has the other half, and if you’re in the right environment, they turn into something larger than the sum of their parts. We often talk about the value of protecting intellectual property, having secretive R&D labs, patenting everything that we have, so that people will be incentivized to come up with more ideas. But I think there’s a case to be made that we should spend at least as much time, if not more, valuing the premise of connecting ideas and not just protecting them.
现在我们所有人面临的挑战是：如何才能创造一个合适的环境，让这些创意有如此长的“半成熟期”呢？现在，一些像谷歌这样的公司都会留出20%的时间，让员工休创新假。从某种意义上说，这就是机构中的灵感培育机制。还有一点，就是让这些灵感与别人的灵感两相结合。你有一个点子，别人也有一个点子，遇到了适宜的环境，两个点子一结合，一加一就会远大于二。我们总是认为保护知识产权、设立秘密的研发实验室和普及专利化非常重要，只有这样才能激励人们不断创新。然而，我想说的是，我们不应只是去保护创意，而忽视了交流创意，至少交流创意应得到我们同等的重视。
An Illuminating Story 一个有启发性的故事
And I’ll leave you with this story. It’s October of 1957, and Sputnik15) has just launched. Two researchers from the Applied Physics Lab associated with Johns Hopkins University are at the cafeteria table having an informal conversation with a bunch of their colleagues. These two guys are named Guier and Weiffenbach. One of them says, “Hey, has anybody tried to listen for this thing? There’s this, you know, man-made satellite up there in outer space that’s obviously broadcasting some kind of signal. We could probably hear it, if we tune in.”And so Guier and Weiffenbach go back to Weiffenbach’s office, and they start kind of noodling around. After a couple of hours, they actually start picking up the signal.
最后，我再给大家讲一个故事。那是1957年的10月，当时苏联的“伴侣号”人造地球卫星刚刚发射上天，约翰斯·霍普金斯大学应用物理实验室的两个研究员正坐在一家咖啡馆里和一群同事闲聊。这俩人分别叫吉尔和韦芬巴赫。其中一个说道：“嘿，有谁想过听听那玩意儿的声音吗？你瞧，这颗人造卫星在太空里，显然是在发射某种信号，对吧？调对了频率，没准儿就能听到那信号呢。”于是两人回到韦芬巴赫的办公室，开始胡乱地调来调去。没想到几个小时之后，他俩真的接收了信号。
These two guys are sitting there listening to this signal, and people start coming into the office and saying, “Wow, that’s pretty cool. Can I hear? ” And before long, they think, “Well jeez, this is kind of historic. We may be the first people in the United States to be listening to this. We should record it.” And so they bring in this big, clunky16) analog tape recorder, and they start recording these little bleeps. And they start writing date stamp, time stamps for each little bleep that they record. And they start thinking, “Well gosh, we’re noticing small little frequency variations here. We could probably calculate the speed that the satellite is traveling.” Then they played around with17) it, and they talked