innovation thrives in irresistible collisions
There is something about smashing things together that is just appealing to the human psyche. Ingredients for an impromptu culinary delight. Different genres for a unique composition. Contrasting schools of art for a captivating design. Protons and ions in a Swiss underground facility.
As a species, we have progressed because we found the thrill and the beauty in looking laterally for inspiration and bringing together things that, to other species, just shouldn't be mixed.
And yet, a common myth persists: that invention and innovation have largely arisen from individuals sitting in solitude, rubbing their foreheads and furiously scribbling out unique equations and designs. As Steven Johnson makes clear in his excellent book Where Good Ideas Come From, innovation becomes more effective as you zoom out and nurture healthy collisions.
You may start with an idea, or a slow hunch, as Johnson elegantly puts it, that is then nurtured in a workspace, shaped further in an organisation, built upon in a settlement and refined in a liquid information network.
Each environment increases the chances that the slow hunch will collide with other research, ideas, problems, and, most importantly, people. Every collision adds to the idea until, yes, a eureka moment may occur. But history skips the slow build-up and remembers only the leap from the bath.
Our brief at Innovation Nursery is clear. Curate more collisions, and let innovation thrive.
So what does that actually mean?
Collisions need to be irresistible. They do not need to be polished. We are lucky to have a site that boasts extraordinary architecture in a stunning part of the world, but that is only the canvas. The collisions themselves can, and should, be slightly chaotic. Building 20 at MIT was not a refined space. It was a plywood shed that threw together people and ideas from different disciplines, and ended up producing nine Nobel Prize winners. They called it the magic incubator.
Collisions need to be multidisciplinary. Ask a physicist a question, the answer will be physics. Ask a designer, the answer will be design. The interesting work happens in the gaps between expertise, which means the work of curation is mostly about who is in the room. Diverse expertise is the precondition for depth and breadth in whatever emerges.
Collisions need a real problem in their sights, and a real path to impact. It is not enough to convene clever people around an interesting question. Ideas must be planted, prototyped, built, and tested in the world. A collision that ends in a research paper is half a collision. The other half is whether anything got made.
This is what we are setting out to build in Cornwall. A living laboratory where the people reimagining food, materials and the built environment can find each other on purpose rather than by accident. Brands and corporates with serious innovation questions sat alongside the academics, scientists, makers, growers and founders who are actually moving the work forward.
Cornwall is not a compromise on this, it is the point. The wind, the salt, the distance, the ruggedness. The lithium and tin in the ground. The marine biology off the coast. The deep agricultural and brewing cultures are already here. Cornwall attracts misfits, experimenters and people who do not wait for permission.
So let's toast the coffee houses, the forums, the Building 20s, the meet-ups and the communities where innovation has flourished. And let's nurture the next generation of collisions the ones that bring together the scientists, business leaders, rebels, reimaginers and weirdos to take on the problems that actually matter.
The site exists. The audience is forming. The work is to fill it with the right collisions and to make them irresistible.
