Creativity is just connecting disparate ideas

Productivity experts have been telling us that cross-group collaboration and weak ties are the skeleton key to unlocking radical creativity.

The history of invention is, in large part, a history of smart people making great leaps forward by combining disparate ideas in domains adjacent to their expertise. As the British philosopher Liam Bright has put it , “anything can be related to anything,” so we ought to build systems that allow people to see previously undiscovered connections between siloed domains.