Where Your Best Ideas Come From

January 22, 2010

Interview with Frans Johansson, author of the book Medici Effect: What Elephants and Epidemics Can Teach Us About Innovation

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Mike Carruthers:
People who come up with great ideas typically have something in common.

Frans Johansson:
If there's one thing that characterizes breakthrough artists, scientists, entrepreneurs - it is that they generate and try out many ideas.

Frans Johansson, author of the book Medici Effect, says Pablo Picasso for example…

He's done over twenty thousand paintings - we don't know of all of them, of course, we know of the ones that became very successful. Prince, you know, he has over a thousand songs that he has not yet used, that's locked up in a secret vault in order to come up with the ones that he did release.

A pencil and paper are a creative person's best friend, says Frans…

We come up with ideas all the time, and we forget them just as fast. Writing them down is the first step. Once we write them down we can return to them particularly, and this is the most important aspect, if we have a strong interest in them. Passion is one of the strongest correlations to innovative success.

And a good idea typically needs an incubation period.

One of the things we do, for instance, is if we have a project due, we work very, very hard - and then almost immediately right after, we think of new, better ideas of how to actually have done it. And sometimes this even happens when sending out an email - we put an email together and then we press "send", and the moment we press "send" we think of some other great things we should have put in there. It's sort of the incubation period for those of us who work here - what is a very good idea to do is to work very hard on something and then plan to step away from it and come back to it. And you will have many, many more fresh ideas.