Continuously changing perspective from the very small to the very large:
When something big happens in the culture -- when a man in Leeds goes on a streak of pioneering natural philosophy; when several nations clustered together in a small subsection of the planet simultaneously reinvent science and government -- that event is rarely the exclusive result of a single layer: one man's genius, say, or the rise of a new economic class. Epic breakthroughs happen when the layers align: when energy flows and settlement patterns and scientific paradigms and individual human lives come into some kind of mutually reinforcing synchrony that helps the new ideas both emerge and circulate through the wider society.
Ample leisure time:
Necessity may be the mother of invention, but most of the great inventors were blessed with something else: leisure time.
Ideas having sex:
Theoretically, it is possible to imagine good ideas happening in a vacuum -- a lone Inuit scientist conjuring up breathtaking discoveries in his igloo, and then keeping them to himself. (Mendel's pea-pod experiments were not that far from this model.) But most important ideas enter the pantheon because they circulate. And the flow is two-way: the ideas happen in the first place because they are triggered by other people's ideas. The whole notion of intellectual circulation of flow is embedded in the world "influence" itself ("to flow into," influere in the original Latin). Good ideas influence, and are themselves influenced by, other ideas. They flow into each other.
The almost radically open sharing of ideas:
The open circulation of ideas was practically the founding credo of the Club of Honest Whigs, and of the eighteenth-century coffeehouse culture in general. With the university system languishing amid archaic traditions, and corporate R&D labs still on the distant horizon, the public space of the coffeehouse served as the central hub of innovation in British society. How much of the Enlightenment do we owe to coffee? Most of the epic developments in England between 1650 and 1800 that still warrant a mention in the history textbooks have a coffeehouse lurking at some crucial juncture in their story. The restoration of Charles II, Newton's theory of gravity, the South Sea Bubble -- they all came about, in part, because England had developed a taste for coffee, and a fondness for the kind of informal networking and shoptalk that the coffeehouse enabled.
Cross-disciplinary exchange:
You can't underestimate the impact that the Club of Honest Whigs had on Priestly's subsequent streak, precisely because he was able to plug in to an existing network of relationships and collaborations that the coffeehouse environment facilitated. Not just because there were learned men of science sitting around the table -- more formal institutions like the Royal Society supplied comparable gatherings -- but also because the coffeehouse culture was cross-disciplinary by nature, the conversations freely roaming from electricity, to the abuses of Parliament, to the fate of dissenting churches.
The "shallow soil" of limited existing knowledge:
The everyday world was teeming with mysterious phenomena -- air, fire, animals, plants, rocks, weather -- that had never before been probed with conceptual tools of the scientific method. This sense of terra incognita also helps explain why Priestly could be so innovative in so many different disciplines, and why Enlightenment culture in general spawned so many distinct paradigm shifts. Amateur dabblers could make transformative scientific discoveries because the history of each field was an embarrassing lineage of conjecture and superstition. Every discipline was suddenly new again. If Priestly and his comrades had unearthed an amazing trove of scientific treasure during these exceptional decades, it was at least in part because the soil was so shallow.
So if the ideal environment for innovation includes all of these things (continuously changing perspective from the very small to the very large; ample leisure time; ideas having sex; the almost radically open sharing of ideas; cross-disciplinary exchange; and the "shallow soil" of limited existing knowledge), where might we expect to find the most innovation today? There are a number of possibilities, but the "Hacker" community seems to me like an especially good one.
