If you look at history, innovation doesn't come just from giving people incentives; it comes from creating environments where their ideas can connect.
Interpretation
Innovation is fostered not just by incentives, but by environments that encourage idea interaction.
The quote by Steven Johnson suggests that the key to innovation lies in creating a supportive environment that allows ideas to mingle and evolve. While monetary or material incentives can motivate individuals, it is the collaborative atmosphere that facilitates the growth of fresh ideas and innovative solutions, highlighting the importance of community and interaction in the creative process.
In practice
During a team meeting, we discussed how to create a more innovative workspace.
How could so many intelligent people be so grievously wrong for such an extended period of time? How could they ignore so much overwhelming evidence that contradicted their most basic theories? These questions, too, deserve their own discipline: the sociology of error.
The adjacent possible is a kind of shadow future, hovering on the edges of the present state of things, a map of all the ways in which the present can reinvent itself.
Most new movements start this way: hundreds or thousands of individuals and groups, working in different fields and different locations, start thinking about change using a common language, without necessarily recognizing those shared values. You just start following your own vector, propelled along by people in your immediate vicinity. And then one day, you look up and realize that all those individual trajectories have turned into a wave.
Organizations that empower folks further down the chain or try to get rid of the big hierarchal chains and allow decision making to happen on a more local level end up being more adaptive and resilient because there are more minds involved in the problem.
What you end up seeing when you look at history is that people who have been good at pushing the boundaries of possibility, and exploring those frontiers of good ideas and innovations, have rarely done it in moments of great inspiration. They don't just have a brilliant breakthrough idea out of nowhere and leap ahead of everyone else.
For decades, we've worked under the assumption that mass culture follows a steadily declining path toward lowest-common-denominator standards, presumably because the 'masses' want dumb, simple pleasures and big media companies want to give the masses what they want.
Just as producers often give consumers things they want but didn't think to ask for, consumers sometimes come up with surprising uses for new inventions. When a new product appears, it can uncover dissatisfactions and desires no one knew were there.
My view is there's no bad time to innovate.
If the idea is really new and unique and big, other people will all think it is bad and is going to fail.
Predicting innovation is something of a self-canceling exercise: the most probable innovations are probably the least innovative.
Want to increase innovation? Lower the cost of failure.
Most innovative things are not obvious to other people at the time. You have to believe in yourself. If you've got a good idea, follow it even though others tell you it's not.
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