Einstein once openly admitted that he had no special talents or skills – that he was just passionately curious. And yet he is the most revered figure in the history of science. Could this be the recipe for generating brilliant ideas? New research suggests that the answer is “yes.”

A study conducted by MIT Sloan School of Management reveals that curiosity about many different things greatly expands your ability to generate brilliant ideas. And the easiest way to do it is to use Twitter. Marketing people, listen closely!

A treasure trove of ideas

When social networks come into discussion, Twitter is often mentioned first. But the thing is Twitter hardly fits the description. It’s actually a microblogging platform that incidentally (or not) has a social side.

Twitter is not designed for likes and photo galleries, though it can be used like that as well. It is primarily designed to let people send out jokes, announcements, links, thoughts and feelings as 160-character “memos” that reach a specific audience, and only that audience: your followers.

So the researchers at MIT decided to use Twitter to assess its impact on idea creation. The study focused on a handful of companies and asked the employees to jot down a fixed number of ideas each. With the ideas submitted, the surveyors analyzed the responses and found that “the ideas of Twitter users were rated significantly more positively by other employees and experts than the ideas of non-users.”

The panel of judges could only see the ideas (not the actual people who submitted them) to prevent making judgments based on other criteria. Now, here’s where it gets interesting.

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The key is not consistency, but diversity

In analyzing the structure of each employee’s Twitter network, the interviewers noticed a positive correlation between how diverse one’s Twitter feed was and the quality of the ideas submitted. Those with cohesive networks received more redundant information and therefore exhibited less powerful “ideation.” The findings were general in nature (i.e. not not specific to one industry or company), MIT said.

Of course, the person wielding the account matters a lot. “Just exposing oneself to diverse fields, opinions and beliefs on Twitter by itself is not sufficient to enhance innovativeness,” according to the researchers.

A Twitter user seeking to improving innovation performance will want to maintain a diverse network while also developing his / her information assimilation, and the ability to exploit that information. Two activities in particular jumped out as being significantly correlated with increasing individual absorptive capacity and personal innovation: “idea scouting” and “idea connecting.” Here’s what they mean, each:

idea scouter = an employee who looks outside the organization to bring in new ideas

idea connector = someone who can assimilate the external ideas and find opportunities within the organization to implement these new concepts

A senior technologist at one of the surveyed firms said, “I don’t necessarily want to follow more people. I just want to follow people whose opinions don’t always align with my own, which is kind of an ongoing battle because after a year or so of following the same people, you find that your opinions shift and morph a little, and suddenly you are with a homogenous group of people again.”

In other words, learning to expand your point of view holds tremendous value, even when you don’t necessarily agree with what is being said on your Twitter feed.

Among the interviewees was also an HR professional who said she followed a 70/30 rule, where 70% were people involved with HR (or relevant to that particular field of work), and the other 30% are completely outside these circles. The reason? To challenge her existing beliefs.