Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation

A good book on idea cultivation for beginners and experienced alike by Steven Johnson – a popular science author and media theorist. His other renowned work include, Everything bad is good for you, The Ghost Map among others. Steven’s narration of the book right from sowing the seed of ideas, to cultivation and enjoying the fruit is simply excellent. His introduction with Darwin’s Paradox on coral reef ecosystem, extending that to the superlinear cities and evolution of the current day internet sets the mood to be more inquisitive of what’s coming next, and it does not disappoint.He has provided informative details of some of the great innovations — those that succeeded and those that failed as well. His statement on Pg. 46 “….an idea is not a single thing. It is more like a swarm.”, more or less gives you a the essence of where good ideas come from and how a good idea has to be identified — from a swarm of ideas and worked upon using various tactics and incubation period. Using coral reefs, evolution, past inventions and accidental discoveries; he convinces how most of the new ideas are born as a result of explorations and errors. He articulates very well on how existing innovation provides a network, a platform; for exchange of ideas that makes people smarter and provides an eco-system to grow better, innovating ideas.As each chapter progresses, he successfully unfolds the intertwined dependency of each tactic to other, thus connecting the dots. His research work on past and current innovations (restricted to western world to a great extend though) and theories of possibilities is commendable. He has picked up discoveries, inventions, innovations right from 1400’s in essence till current.He ends well by adapting framework from Yochai Benkler’s book on four possible combinations — Market/Individual, Market Network, Non-Market/Individual and Non-Market/Network — to demonstrate the impact of legal system, economies of market place, individual contribution and collaborative contribution resulting in the number of viable and successful innovations that churn out under each quadrant.Over all a good read.

It's a really good book on Ideas and patterns of innovation but the author seems to be trying really hard to convince the reader that the patterns that he sees are true. He gives examples after examples after examples after examples and drags the same things again and again. Takes too much time to get to the point which gets boring.Other than that, it's a good book on the getting ideas and seeing the patterns of innovation in life in general.

Highly recommended. Deep insights on what leads to innovation. Favourite line : innovation occurs at boundaries of order and chaos!No surprise one of the favourites books quoted by bill gates.

Steven Johnson provides us a ringside view of the innovation process and in the bargain demolishes many myths about innovation and innovators!

Just got the paperback copy delivered and started reading the book. I obviously can’t yet comment of the content...but was compelled to leave a feedback here about the typesetting- the font style, size and spacing... it’s BAD...🤣🤣🤣(so much for innovation and good ideas..& I thought this problem was already solved and optimised).Hopefully the contents of the book will make up for the bad fonts and make it worth straining my eyes...I look forward to reading it.

This book proves some of the ideas that I always thought were true. Good read and can be applied in everyday life.

If you're a big picture kind of person you'll love it. Architecture students with a bit of entrepreneurial flair will find this book insightful. I found this book useful to write a particularly grand and inter disciplinary SOP!

One of the best books by Stephen Johnson so far. It will help you connect all the dots to make you realize the why and how of the most basic thing we take it for granted. Definitely, recommend buying it.

Kind of a slow read

There are many ways to measure innovation, but perhaps the most elemental yardstick, at least where technology is concerned, revolves around the job that the technology in question lets you do. All other things being equal, a breakthrough that lets you execute two jobs that were impossible before is twice as innovative as a breakthrough that lets you do only one new thing.If we want to understand where good ideas come from, we have to put them in context. Darwin’s world-changing idea unfolded inside his brain, but think of all the environments and tools he needed to piece it together: a ship, an archipelago, a notebook, a library, a coral reef. Our thought shapes the spaces we inhabit, and our spaces return the favor. The argument of this book is that a series of shared properties and patterns recur again and again in unusually fertile environments.In the language of complexity theory, these patterns of innovation and creativity are fractal: they reappear in recognizable form as you zoom in and out, from molecule to neuron to pixel to sidewalk.Traveling across these different environments and scales is not merely intellectual tourism. Science long ago realized that we can understand something better by studying its behavior in different contexts.Analyzing innovation on the scale of individuals and organizations—as the standard textbooks do—distorts our view. It creates a picture of innovation that overstates the role of proprietary research and “survival of the fittest” competition. The long-zoom approach lets us see that openness and connectivity may, in the end, be more valuable to innovation than purely competitive mechanismsGood ideas are like the NeoNurture device. They are, inevitably, constrained by the parts and skills that surround them. We have a natural tendency to romanticize breakthrough innovations, imagining momentous ideas transcending their surroundings, a gifted mind somehow seeing over the detritus of old ideas and ossified tradition. But ideas are works of bricolage; they’re built out of that detritus. We take the ideas we’ve inherited or that we’ve stumbled across, and we jigger them together into some new shape.The strange and beautiful truth about the adjacent possible is that its boundaries grow as you explore those boundaries. Each new combination ushers new combinations into the adjacent possible. Think of it as a house that magically expands with each door you open. You begin in a room with four doors, each leading to a new room that you haven’t visited yet. Those four rooms are the adjacent possible. But once you open one of those doors and stroll into that room, three new doors appear, each leading to a brand-new room that you couldn’t have reached from your original starting point. Keep opening new doors and eventually you’ll have built a palace.In the early 1920s, two Columbia University scholars named William Ogburn and Dorothy Thomas decided to track down as many multiples as they could find, eventually publishing their survey in an influential essay with the delightful title “Are Inventions Inevitable?” Ogburn and Thomas found 148 instances of independent innovation, most them occurring within the same decade.Unlocking a new door can lead to a world-changing scientific breakthrough, but it can also lead to a more effective strategy for teaching second-graders, or a novel marketing idea for the vacuum cleaner your company’s about to release. The trick is to figure out ways to explore the edges of possibility that surround you. This can be as simple as changing the physical environment you work in, or cultivating a specific kind of social network, or maintaining certain habits in the way you seek out and store information.Recall the question we began with: What kind of environment creates good ideas? The simplest way to answer it is this: innovative environments are better at helping their inhabitants explore the adjacent possible, because they expose a wide and diverse sample of spare parts—mechanical or conceptual—and they encourage novel ways of recombining those parts. Environments that block or limit those new combinations—by punishing experimentation, by obscuring certain branches of possibility, by making the current state so satisfying that no one bothers to explore the edges—will, on average, generate and circulate fewer innovations than environments that encourage exploration.In a way, the engineers at Mission Control had it easier than most. Challenging problems don’t usually define their adjacent possible in such a clear, tangible way. Part of coming up with a good idea is discovering what those spare parts are, and ensuring that you’re not just recycling the same old ingredients.A good idea is a network. A specific constellation of neurons—thousands of them—fire in sync with each other for the first time in your brain, and an idea pops into your consciousness. A new idea is a network of cells exploring the adjacent possible of connections that they can make in your mind.Most theories of life’s origins incorporate some variation of the “primordial soup”: an environment where novel combinations could occur thanks to the swirl and flow of liquid. Carbon may be a talented connector, but without a medium that allows it to collide randomly with other elements, those connective powers are likely to go to waste. All those spectacular polymer chains would remain unrealized, hidden behind the locked doors of the adjacent possible.With a science like molecular biology, we inevitably have an image in our heads of the scientist alone in the lab, hunched over a microscope, and stumbling across a major new finding. But Dunbar’s study showed that those isolated eureka moments were rarities. Instead, most important ideas emerged during regular lab meetings, where a dozen or so researchers would gather and informally present and discuss their latest work.But the Phoenix memo might well have been instrumental in stopping the attacks had it followed a pattern that recurs throughout the history of world-changing ideas. It was a hunch that needed to collide with another hunch.A metropolis shares one key characteristic with the Web: both environments are dense, liquid networks where information easily flows along multiple unpredictable paths. Those interconnections nurture great ideas, because most great ideas come into the world half-baked, more hunch than revelation.Hunches that don’t connect are doomed to stay hunches.Because these slow hunches need so much time to develop, they are fragile creatures, easily lost to the more pressing needs of day-to-day issues.But if one examines the intellectual fossil record closely, the slow hunch is the rule, not the exception.It is simply hard to pinpoint exactly when Darwin had the idea, because the idea didn’t arrive in a flash; it drifted into his consciousness over time, in waves. In the months before the Malthus reading, we could probably say that Darwin had the idea of natural selection in his head, but at the same time was incapable of fully thinking it. This is how slow hunches often mature: by stealth, in small steps. They fade into view.Keeping a slow hunch alive poses challenges on multiple scales. For starters, you have to preserve the hunch in your own memory, in the dense network of your neurons. Most slow hunches never last long enough to turn into something useful, because they pass in and out of our memory too quickly, precisely because they possess a certain murkiness. You get a feeling that there’s an interesting avenue to explore, a problem that might someday lead you to a solution, but then you get distracted by more pressing matters and the hunch disappears. So part of the secret of hunch cultivation is simple: write everything down.We can see Darwin’s ideas evolve because on some basic level the notebook platform creates a cultivating space for his hunches; it is not that the notebook is a mere transcription of the ideas, which are happening offstage somewhere in Darwin’s mind. Darwin was constantly rereading his notes, discovering new implications. His ideas emerge as a kind of duet between the present-tense thinking brain and all those past observations recorded on paper.The work of dreams turns out to be a particularly chaotic, yet productive, way of exploring the adjacent possible. In a sense, dreams are the mind’s primordial soup: the medium that facilitates the serendipitous collisions of creative insight. And hunches are like those early carbon atoms, seeking out new kinds of connections to help them build new chains and rings of innovation.Serendipity needs unlikely collisions and discoveries, but it also needs something to anchor those discoveries. Otherwise, your ideas are like carbon atoms randomly colliding with other atoms in the primordial soup without ever forming the rings and lattices of organic life.“The errors of the great mind exceed in number those of the less vigorous one.”error is not simply a phase you have to suffer through on the way to genius. Error often creates a path that leads you out of your comfortable assumptions.Being right keeps you in place. Being wrong forces you to explore.Paradigm shifts, in Kuhn’s argument, begin with anomalies in the data, when scientists find that their predictions keep turning out to be wrong.When we’re wrong, we have to challenge our assumptions, adopt new strategies. Being wrong on its own doesn’t unlock new doors in the adjacent possible, but it does force us to look for them.big cities nurture subcultures much more effectively than suburbs or small towns.Lifestyles or interests that deviate from the mainstream need critical mass to survive; they atrophy in smaller communities not because those communities are more repressive, but rather because the odds of finding like-minded people are much lower with a smaller pool of individuals.The cultural diversity those subcultures create is valuable not just because it makes urban life less boring. The value also lies in the unlikely migrations that happen between the different clusters. A world where a diverse mix of distinct professions and passions overlap is a world where exaptations thrive.Legendary innovators like Franklin, Snow, and Darwin all possess some common intellectual qualities—a certain quickness of mind, unbounded curiosity—but they also share one other defining attribute. They have a lot of hobbies.In a real sense, for Snow to make his great breakthrough in understanding cholera, he had to think like a molecular chemist and like a physician. As a slow multitasker, he had those interpretative systems readily available to him when his focus turned to the mystery of cholera. As we saw with the feathers of Archaeopteryx, Snow couldn’t have anticipated that his mechanical tinkering with chloroform inhalers would prove useful in ridding the modern world of a deadly bacterium, but that is the unpredictable power of exaptations. Chance favors the connected mind.This is a wonder which does not at first strike the eye of the body, but, after reflection, the eye of reason.”The platform builders and ecosystem engineers do not just open a door in the adjacent possible. They build an entire new floor.Ideas rise in crowds, as Poincaré said. They rise in liquid networks where connection is valued more than protection.The patterns are simple, but followed together, they make for a whole that is wiser than the sum of its parts. Go for a walk; cultivate hunches; write everything down, but keep your folders messy; embrace serendipity; make generative mistakes; take on multiple hobbies; frequent coffeehouses and other liquid networks; follow the links; let others build on your ideas; borrow, recycle, reinvent. Build a tangled bank.

L'innovation est au coeur des discours actuels dans tous les domaines : économie, sport, loisirs, développement personnel... Cet essai très bien écrit propose une histoire de la génération d'innovation qui ont transformé le monde, et à travers cela une analyse sur les facteurs clés qui contribuent à leur apparition et à leur développement. J'y vois un excellent plaidoyer en faveur du partage des connaissances et de l'open source, qui conforte mon enthousiasme pour ces domaines. Une lecture à mettre entre toutes les mains, pour contribuer à améliorer le monde !

Good

I read this book from the library originally and had to buy it so I could have a copy always on hand. Really good read with interesting facts about ideas and the thought process.