Swap Ideas Day

What the day is

Swap Ideas Day is observed on September 10, encouraging people to trade ideas rather than guard them.

Origin and background

Historians and economists who study invention keep arriving at the same description: new things are overwhelmingly combinations of existing things. The printing press assembled a screw press, movable type and oil-based ink, none of them new. Studies of patent records find that the most novel patents are typically those combining previously unconnected areas of technology, and that genuinely unprecedented components are rare. This is why access to other people's ideas matters more than raw inventiveness, and why the same discovery is so often made by several people at once.

It follows that who you talk to shapes what you can think of. The well-known work on weak ties found that useful new information tends to arrive through acquaintances rather than close friends, because close friends mostly know what you already know. A network of people similar to you recirculates the same material, however clever everyone in it is.

The awkward finding concerns how organizations actually do this. Group brainstorming, in the familiar everyone-in-a-room form, reliably produces fewer and less varied ideas than the same people would produce working separately and pooling the results afterward. The main cause is production blocking: only one person can speak at a time, so everyone else is waiting, and while waiting they lose their own thread and drift toward whatever was just said. Evaluation apprehension and free-riding add to it.

The fix is not to stop meeting but to change the order. Generate alone, then combine, then discuss. That structure keeps the independent variety and still gets the recombination.

Ideas also cost nothing to give away, since you still have yours afterward, which is a genuinely unusual property.

How to take part

• Write your ideas down before the meeting, not during it.
• Ask somebody outside your field what they would do.
• Give an idea away to somebody better placed to use it.
• Notice when a room has converged on the first suggestion made.