What’s the big idea? – “Every really new idea looks crazy at first.”

“Every really new idea looks crazy at first.” Alfred North Whitehead, pillar of Cambridge and founding father of analytic psychology, said that. Radiohead, an art-rock group of English intellectuals of a different sort, once had a song called “Big Ideas (Don’t Get Any).” I used to think the title was hilarious in an intellectually cynical way only Oxford students-turned-rock stars could master. Now I think it might have been genius.

As we leave an era defined by the pursuit of physical property and enter one forged by the search for intellectual property, there is increasing evidence that very few big, instantaneous ideas exist, only an accumulation of smaller, slower-growing ones.

This is good news for Baton Rouge—a rebuttal to those who complain about the pace of cultural progress in the city.

If a new crop of theorists is correct, our pace may be just about right.

This month’s cover story grew, not out a series of single “a-ha moments,” but something more akin to what author Steven Johnson calls a “collision of slow hunches.”

In his book, Where Good Ideas Come From, Johnson argues that most important ideas take a long time to evolve. Ideas, he writes, result from the blending of smaller concepts, theories, even half-baked notions, often in environments where unique collaborators or spheres of knowledge can easily intersect.

Our city is undergoing a sea change in how we view ourselves and the value we place on our own ideas.

With SeNSE Pitch Nights, Baton Rouge Entrepreneur Week and the StartupBus, a growing film industry and new arts groups like Elevator Projects and BRWalls, we seem to have, for lack of a better term, a new idea about ideas.

Poet and publisher T.S. Eliot believed that the great ages of man did not produce more talent, just wasted less of it.

Are good ideas going to waste in Baton Rouge because we are focused on striking “Eureka!” ideas instead of collaborating on smaller ones? Or because those holding the purse strings are too afraid of failure?

Ask a scientist if he benefits from failed experiments.

J.K. Rowling was on welfare before finding success with her Harry Potter series. Lennon and McCartney wrote nearly 100 songs—most of them mediocre—before earning a recording contract. Edison constructed 1,000 dim bulbs before completing the first that flared alight.

Theodore Roosevelt understood this positive relationship between chaos and creation, calling Americans to “dare mighty things” even if “checkered by failure.”

Now local entrepreneurs have the chance to benefit from an intriguing new micro-financing option in the form of the 225Fund.

Not affiliated with 225, the 225Fund is operated by a board of donors that reviews applications and awards $1,000 each month to a new endeavor—no strings attached.

It’s a bit like Shark Tank without the toothy financiers.

One board member described it to me as an “experiment in guerrilla marketing,” because, as the group’s website states: “Crazy ideas need money too.”

That is the kind of innovation-minded attitude that could help new local ideas take flight, and it’s a slow hunch both Whitehead and Radiohead would agree with.