Anyone having an urge to toast the inventors of the World Wide Web, or GPS, should do so with coffee, or
maybe tea.
And they should do it in the company of people of diverse intellectual interest,. And it wouldn’t be so
bad if the toast were offered during work time.
All that would be perfectly fitting, according to Steven Berlin Johnson, the keynote speaker at
"Differentiate Yourself!" the annual Sebo Series in Entrepreneurship at Bowling Green State
University.
Johnson spent five years researching his book
"Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation." The award-winning journalist
set out to find "unusually innovative environments"
– corporate workplaces, virtual environments
or natural spaces.
Among his discoveries was that the much heralded "eureka moment is almost always a myth," he
said. "Most world changing ideas … take much, much longer to develop."
More important are "slow hunches," Johnson said.
Take the World Wide Web. Tim Berners-Lee started developing the idea as a way of sharing scholarly papers
in 1980. It went through several stages, and finally came to fruition in 1989, when he showed it to his
bosses at CERN.
Companies would do well, he said, to allow employees to carve out time to work on their own ideas. Google
lets employees spend 20-percent of work time on pet projects. The result is about half of the
developments the company brings to market.
A great idea also just waits for the proper time. The World Wide Web needed the Internet, and the
Internet relied on a host of other developments. "The idea needed the world to catch up to
it," Johnson said.
An innovator is reliant on the tools and resources available – "the adjacent possible."
State-of-the-art neonatal incubators sent to Africa had limited utility because usually after a year or
so they would break down, and no one had the knowledge or materials to repair them.
That was until a doctor noticed that while technology in these remote villages was rare, Toyota SUVs were
common. The result was a neonatal incubator constructed entirely of auto parts. "If you can fix a
Toyota 4Runner you can fix this," Johnson said.
In considering "what kind of environments facilitate the mixing of these ideas," he came upon
the 18th century coffeehouse, which was "crucial to the technological innovation of The
Enlightenment."
The insurance giant Lloyd’s of London was originally Lloyd’s Coffeehouse where sea captains gathered to
complain about lost cargoes, and developed what turned out to be the insurance business.
The introduction of coffee and tea had a salutary effect on society as a whole. Previously the drinks of
choice were alcoholic – wine, beer, gin. Switching from a society where everyone was "drunk all day
long," he said, certainly helped, as did the nature of the coffeehouse itself, "a
multidisciplinary space" where people could talk across "the boundaries of expertise."

Johnson said that when he looked at the social circles of entrepreneurs, he found those who were most
successful had connections to people "in a diverse range of professions.
Technological innovation often involves "exaptation," a term the author borrowed from biology.
This occurs when a feature that evolved for one reason, turns out to be useful for another function.
Birds developed feathers to stay warm, but then feathers proved useful for flying.
The key step in developing the printing press came when Gutenberg discussed the part he needed for the
printing press while visiting a winery.
In 1957, two young physicists, William Guier and George Weiffenbach at the Applied Physics Lab at Johns
Hopkins in Baltimore, were spurred by talk in the cafeteria following the launch of Sputnik. They
figured out how to track the Russian satellite simply because it was "just cool."
But their side project caught the attention of the military, which needed a way to target missiles from
nuclear submarines.
Among the spin-offs was geospatial positioning technology. So work that started as a lark, developed into
something to guide missiles to Moscow during the Cold War, and now helps someone find a vanilla latte.