“There’s always someone more ignorant than you!” Ronald Burt, a professor of sociology and strategy at the University of Chicago’s prestigious Booth School of Business is definitely up for looking on the bright side. In fact, that opening mantra? It’s his way of saying maybe there isn’t anything new under the sun—but if it’s new to you? You can work with that.

According to the Chicago Tribune’s “Blue Sky Innovation,” Burt says there are two good ways to network that to support your ideas. Those who need to work on nitty gritty improvements—say getting production processes fine-tuned—need “closure,” or a tight social network of specialists. But those “charged with innovation need to branch out and build brokerage,” or a diverse network of people and insights from different fields and even different mindsets.

These superconnective people might be more innovative because they have a broad network, can learn about trends faster than their peers, and they jump on new ideas. The trick is, a broad network can be made up of shallow connections—hand-shakes, Facebook friending, and business card exchanges don’t exactly add up to a huge group of confidants and collaborators.

What to do? Shallow, but big pool, or small, deep pool?

Burt thinks you can have it all (remember, he’s a positive guy). Thus, he boils his innovation insights down into four key ideas: branch out, but not without a goal (don’t just read the entire Internet); keep your enemies close (that is, get to know competitors and people who don’t agree with you); set a deadline (“We all get a say! Before Monday at 3pm!”); and play pretend (imagine you’re not an accountant but a psychiatrist; what does the problem look like now?).