about 10 blocks from here.

This is the Grand Cafe here in Oxford.

I took this picture because this turns out to be

the first coffeehouse to open

in England in 1650.

That's its great claim to fame,

and I wanted to show it to you,

not because I want to give you the kind of Starbucks tour

of historic England,

but rather because

the English coffeehouse was crucial

to the development and spread

of one of the great intellectual flowerings of the last 500 years,

what we now call the Enlightenment.

And the coffeehouse played such a big role

in the birth of the Enlightenment,

in part, because of what people were drinking there.

Because, before the spread

of coffee and tea through British culture,

what people drank -- both elite and mass folks drank --

day-in and day-out, from dawn until dusk

was alcohol.

Alcohol was the daytime beverage of choice.

You would drink a little beer with breakfast and have a little wine at lunch,

a little gin -- particularly around 1650 --

and top it off with a little beer and wine at the end of the day.

That was the healthy choice -- right --

because the water wasn't safe to drink.

And so, effectively until the rise of the coffeehouse,

you had an entire population

that was effectively drunk all day.

And you can imagine what that would be like, right, in your own life --

and I know this is true of some of you --

if you were drinking all day,

and then you switched from a depressant to a stimulant in your life,

you would have better ideas.

You would be sharper and more alert.

And so it's not an accident that a great flowering of innovation happened

as England switched to tea and coffee.

But the other thing that makes the coffeehouse important

is the architecture of the space.

It was a space where people would get together

from different backgrounds,

different fields of expertise, and share.

It was a space, as Matt Ridley talked about, where ideas could have sex.

This was their conjugal bed, in a sense --

ideas would get together there.

And an astonishing number of innovations from this period

have a coffeehouse somewhere in their story.

I've been spending a lot of time thinking about coffeehouses

for the last five years,

because I've been kind of on this quest

to investigate this question

of where good ideas come from.

What are the environments

that lead to unusual levels of innovation,

unusual levels of creativity?

What's the kind of environmental --

what is the space of creativity?

And what I've done is

I've looked at both environments like the coffeehouse;

I've looked at media environments, like the world wide web,

that have been extraordinarily innovative;

I've gone back to the history of the first cities;

I've even gone to biological environments,

like coral reefs and rainforests,

that involve unusual levels of biological innovation;

and what I've been looking for is shared patterns,

kind of signature behavior that shows up

again and again in all of these environments.

Are there recurring patterns that we can learn from,

that we can take and kind of apply to our own lives,

or our own organizations,

or our own environments to make them more creative and innovative?

And I think I've found a few.

But what you have to do to make sense of this

and to really understand these principles

is you have to do away

with a lot of the way in which our conventional metaphors and language

steers us towards

certain concepts of idea-creation.

We have this very rich vocabulary

to describe moments of inspiration.

We have the kind of the flash of insight,

the stroke of insight,

we have epiphanies, we have "eureka!" moments,

we have the lightbulb moments, right?

All of these concepts,

as kind of rhetorically florid as they are,

share this basic assumption,

which is that an idea is a single thing,

it's something that happens often

in a wonderful illuminating moment.

But in fact, what I would argue and what you really need to kind of begin with

is this idea that an idea is a network

on the most elemental level.

I mean, this is what is happening inside your brain.

An idea -- a new idea -- is a new network of neurons

firing in sync with each other inside your brain.

It's a new configuration that has never formed before.

And the question is: how do you get your brain into environments

where these new networks are going to be more likely to form?

And it turns out that, in fact, the kind of network patterns of the outside world

mimic a lot of the network patterns

of the internal world of the human brain.

So the metaphor I'd like the use

I can take

from a story of a great idea that's quite recent --

a lot more recent than the 1650s.

A wonderful guy named Timothy Prestero,

who has a company called ... an organization called Design That Matters.

They decided to tackle this really pressing problem

of, you know, the terrible problems we have with infant mortality rates

in the developing world.

One of the things that's very frustrating about this is that we know,

by getting modern neonatal incubators

into any context,

if we can keep premature babies warm, basically -- it's very simple --

we can halve infant mortality rates in those environments.

So, the technology is there.

These are standard in all the industrialized worlds.

The problem is, if you buy a $40,000 incubator,

and you send it off

to a mid-sized village in Africa,

it will work great for a year or two years,

and then something will go wrong and it will break,

and it will remain broken forever,

because you don't have a whole system of spare parts,

and you don't have the on-the-ground expertise

to fix this $40,000 piece of equipment.

And so you end up having this problem where you spend all this money

getting aid and all these advanced electronics to these countries,

and then it ends up being useless.

So what Prestero and his team decided to do

is to look around and see: what are the abundant resources

in these developing world contexts?

And what they noticed was they don't have a lot of DVRs,

they don't have a lot of microwaves,

but they seem to do a pretty good job of keeping their cars on the road.

There's a Toyota Forerunner

on the street in all these places.

They seem to have the expertise to keep cars working.

So they started to think,

"Could we build a neonatal incubator

that's built entirely out of automobile parts?"

And this is what they ended up coming with.

It's called a "neonurture device."

From the outside, it looks like a normal little thing

you'd find in a modern, Western hospital.

In the inside, it's all car parts.

It's got a fan, it's got headlights for warmth,

it's got door chimes for alarm --

it runs off a car battery.

And so all you need is the spare parts from your Toyota

and the ability to fix a headlight,

and you can repair this thing.

Now, that's a great idea, but what I'd like to say is that, in fact,

this is a great metaphor for the way that ideas happen.

We like to think our breakthrough ideas, you know,

are like that $40,000, brand new incubator,

state-of-the-art technology,

but more often than not, they're cobbled together

from whatever parts that happen to be around nearby.

We take ideas from other people,

from people we've learned from, from people we run into in the coffee shop,

and we stitch them together into new forms and we create something new.

That's really where innovation happens.

And that means that we have to change some of our models

of what innovation and deep thinking really looks like, right.

I mean, this is one vision of it.

Another is Newton and the apple, when Newton was at Cambridge.

This is a statue from Oxford.

You know, you're sitting there thinking a deep thought,

and the apple falls from the tree, and you have the theory of gravity.

In fact, the spaces that have historically led to innovation

tend to look like this, right.

This is Hogarth's famous painting of a kind of political dinner at a tavern,

but this is what the coffee shops looked like back then.

This is the kind of chaotic environment

where ideas were likely to come together,

where people were likely to have

new, interesting, unpredictable collisions -- people from different backgrounds.

So, if we're trying to build organizations that are more innovative,

we have to build spaces that -- strangely enough -- look a little bit more like this.

This is what your office should look like,

is part of my message here.

And one of the problems with this is that

people are actually -- when you research this field --

people are notoriously unreliable,

when they actually kind of self-report

on where they have their own good ideas,

or their history of their best ideas.

And a few years ago, a wonderful researcher named Kevin Dunbar

decided to go around

and basically do the Big Brother 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.

So when they were sitting in front of the microscope,

when they were talking to their colleague at the water cooler, and all these things.

And he recorded all of these conversations

and tried to figure out where the most important ideas,

where they happened.

And when we think about the classic image of the scientist in the lab,

we have this image -- you know, they're pouring over the microscope,

and they see something in the tissue sample.

And "oh, eureka," they've got the idea.

What happened actually when Dunbar kind of looked at the tape

is that, in fact, almost all of the important breakthrough ideas

did not happen alone in the lab, in front of the microscope.

They happened at the conference table

at the weekly lab meeting,

when everybody got together and shared their kind of latest data and findings,

oftentimes when people shared the mistakes they were having,

the error, the noise in the signal they were discovering.

And something about that environment --

and 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 is, in fact,

the environment that leads to innovation.

The other problem that people have

is they like to condense their stories of innovation down

to kind of shorter time frames.

So they want to tell the story of the "eureka!" moment.

They want to say, "There I was, I was standing there

and I had it all suddenly clear in my head."

But in fact, if you go back and 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 recently

about hunch and instinct

and blink-like sudden moments of clarity,

but in fact, a lot of great ideas

linger on, sometimes for decades,

in the back of people's minds.