In 'Where Good Ideas Come From' Steven Johnson reveals that diversity and openness are ingredients of innovation:
"What kind of environment creates good ideas? The simplest way to answer it is this: innovative environments are better at helping their inhabitants explore the adjacent possible..."
"Most important ideas emerged during regular lab meetings, where a dozen or so researchers would gather and informally present and discuss their latest work…the ground zero of innovation was not the microscope. It was the conference table."
"The secret to organizational inspiration is to build information networks that allow hunches to persist and disperse and recombine. Instead of cloistering your hunches in brainstorm sessions or R&D labs..."
"The most creative individuals...consistently had broad social networks that extended outside their organization and involved people from diverse fields of expertise."
"What makes the reef so inventive is not the struggle between the organisms but the way they have learned to collaborate...the reef has unlocked so many doors of the adjacent possible because of the way it shares."
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Cultural diversity and creativity.