Intimate Innovation

Matt Ridley  has a talk on TED in which he discusses the hyper-connectivity of the current world, facilitated by digital technology (especially platform technologies). Buy implication the relative ease of world travel and the related population flows must be a factor, too. He uses biological metaphors to bring this idea alive – he talks about ‘ideas having sex’; he dwells on the opportunity for ideas to meet and mate as never before. This metaphor is one with intimate overtones, but also interesting implications. It suggests:

• that mutation is important to the long term health of idea-exchange
• that variety and differentiation are also factors that underpin innovation
• that ideas ‘have’ one another, and you – you are as much ‘had’ by an idea’ as you ‘have’ it; and
• that there are risks of the innovation equivalents of ‘incest’ and in-breeding’.

One can image an innovation culture too close to its self, that became prone to consanguinity; the metaphor implies we need many many ways to allow ideas to have sex.