An idea is the outcome of all that has gone before, resulting in the “eureka” moment, the equivalent of the singers overnight success after 10 years of work in obscurity, playing smokey bars, gaining experience and honing skills.
Usually, ideas emerge from relative chaos of all the commercial equivalents of those smokey bars, places where problems, experiments, stories, left field solutions and all the richness of human interaction meet.
Makes you think that perhaps all this time around the water cooler is not really wasted, so long as the culture is tolerant of the ideas that will be thrown up, and enables something to be done with them.