Where Good Ideas Come From

Where Good Ideas Come From

Author

Steven Johnson

Year
2010
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Review

The majority of innovation comes from brilliant individuals and eureka moments (except it doesn’t). Clearly there’s more to innovation - and it’s a more empowering mindset and it’s good news we can be more systematic at creating innovation in society and institutions.

I loved this book, and it’s strengthened my belief in second brains!

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Key Takeaways

The 20% that gave me 80% of the value.

  • Darwin’s Paradox: Coral Reefs 0.01% of marine area, but 25% of diversity
  • As cities get bigger, they generate more ideas per capita. The average person in a city of 5 million is 3x more creative than those in one of 100k
  • The 10x10 rule
    • Innovation: It takes 10 years to build build the platform
    • Adoption: It takes 10 years to get mass adoption (colour TV, HD TV)
    • But YouTube took just 2 years (1x1)
  • Many patterns that appear in nature appear in business:
    • Competition - Overstated impact, because it seems more prevalent at the individual and organisational level than it does at the other ones
    • Openness and connectivity are actually more important to the overall development of innovation
  • Innovation happens at many levels, we overemphasise the ones that we see:
    • Global Evolution, Eco systems, Species, Brains, Cells
    • Ideas, Workspaces, Organisations, Settlements, Information networks
  • Generative environments often have innovation going on at different levels.
  • To increase innovation we’d be better served by connecting ideas than protecting them
  • The Adjacent Possible
    • Evolution is a tinkerer not an engineer.
    • The gradual and relentless pursuit of the adjacent possible.
    • Good ideas don’t come from thin air, they are built out of a collection of existing parts, some are ways of solving problems, some are mechanical parts or technologies.
      • Oxygen was discovered shortly after we had the ability to measure it
      • Are Inventions are inevitable? Was a study of inventions that happen in 2 places at once, its almost indistinguishable from the list of most important inventions
    • The adjacent possible is much about limits as it is about openings. The history of cultural progress is almost always in small steps, somebody opening one door that leads to another door.
    • It’s rare for somebody to come up with an idea that enables us to skip a few rooms, they are called ‘ahead of their time’
      • Babbage ideas on computing were so ahead of his time they escaped the adjacent possible, and weren’t realised.
      • YouTube would not have worked 5 or 10 years earlier
    • To innovate, explore the edges of the adjacent possible that exist around you. What kind of environments are good for innovation... those that expose a wide variety of parts and show the adjacent possible, and encourage novel ways of combining those
      • Innovation is all about having spare parts that can be combined in new combinations. The key to innovation is not about having big thoughts, but to get more parts on the table. Like the Apollo 13 Solution
  • Liquid Networks
    • A good idea is better described a network (than a spark). A network of cells that are exploring the adjacent possible connections you can make in your mind.
    • To make your brain more conducive to making new connections, what environment do you put it in?
    • What drove life and innovation on planet earth?
      1. a capacity to make as many new connections as possible
      2. An environment that makes random connections possible and probable
    • Innovative systems gravitate towards the edge of chaos.
      • A gas is chaotic and ephemeral
      • A solid is stable and boring
      • A liquid makes new connections possible through adjacent connections
    • Agriculture made it possible to have cities, connections and collaboration. Information spill over. As soon as we had cities and writing, we became radically more innovative
    • Large collectives are rarely capable of innovation. There’s no wisdom of the crowd, its the wisdom of someone in the crowd. Individuals get smarter because they are connected to the network
    • A study of innovation showed the important ideas occurred in regular lab meetings. The group environment helped reconceptualise problems, questions from colleagues challenge assumptions and think about things at a new scale, or in a new way
  • The Slow Hunch
    • Most great ideas come into the world half baked, in a partial incomplete form, they lack a missing element, that missing element might be in somebody else’s head. If they don’t connect, they fail
      • 911 was somewhat predicted by 2 different hunches. One about an individual who showed little interest in landing a 747 or getting a job as a pilot, and another that spotted a larger pattern of people of interest going to flying school. If they were put together, we could have solved something
    • Most ideas are people searching for a solution to a problem over a long period of time. Sometimes for decades.
    • Slow hunches are easily lost, so they need to be nurtured and cultivated.
    • Darwin’s natural selection - he described as a moment of inspiration. Although when you examine all of his notebooks, all the building blocks were there. Variation, competition, changes over time..
    • Write everything down! The notebook platform provides a space for ideas to cultivate. Darwin was constantly re-reading his notes, almost a duet between his past self and present self.
      • Building a second brain was called common placing (100’s of years ago) 1652. Bells common place book. Darwin inherited a common place book.
      • Re-reading and re-writing your common place book. You want to be able to find things, but also have freedom to have random thoughts. Too much order can stop new ideas emerging.
  • Serendipity
    • A hunch has to connect with other ideas. The more disorganised your brain is, the smarter you are (the opposite of executing a habit).
    • Serendipity is when you discover a missing bit of the puzzle. You need something to hang the ideas off of.
    • How do you create environments that foster serendipity:
      • Seems like a contradiction to try and create serendipity
      • Go for a walk, long showers, bath tubs.
      • There does seem to a pattern, about thinking deeply, then letting go. When letting go, new connections arise and new ideas occurs
      • To cross pollinate ideas, try reading lots of books in a short amount of time. Bill Gates and others have reading holidays. By compressing it into a few days, you give new ideas a chance to network
    • Having a second brain can help serendipity. Newspapers are serendipity machines.
    • Filters reduce serendipity (not native to the web). The information diversity on the web, there’s always something interesting to come across, but there’s almost too much, thats why we have filters.
  • Restrictions on the spread of new ideas (patents) make things worse. Closed environments inhibit serendipity. Secrecy comes with great cost, turn your R&D labs inside out.
  • Brainstorming - generative ideas. (Its finite in time and space, you need something asynchronous to increase the chance of serendipity)
  • Build information management systems, that allow ideas to persist, disperse and recombine. Create an environment where brainstorming is constantly running in the background, a collective version of the 20% time. Create a database of collective hunches. A suggestion box. Hunches about new ideas, visible to everyone, people can come and build on them. Vote on colleagues suggestions. Idea exchange. Individual and collective. Make them public, give good ideas new ways to connect.
  • Error
    • Steady consistent accumulation of error leads to invention
    • The pacemaker came from the novel combination of spare parts (used the wrong resistor and it sounded like a heart beat). He'd been thinking about irregular heart beats as a signal transition problem for 5 years prior to that though
      • Slow burn of a problem (always working on a problem)
    • The errors of a great mind, exceed in number those of a less vigorous one
    • Probe at the edges of error, being right keeps you in place, being wrong forces you to explore
    • Transform error into insight. Conceptualise scenarios where the error might actually be meaningful
    • Subtle mutations in the genetic code is a better recipe for innovation than complete random code generation (most would die after birth)
    • Evolution didn't close the door on mutation, 1 in 30m base pairs, 150 mutations per person
    • You want to be able to pass on mutation, without passing on genes that make mutation too common, as further mutations will crowd out the successful ones. So you need some stability to allow for evolution
  • Weak tie Exaptation
    • Exaptation: the process by which features acquire functions for which they were not originally adapted or selected.
    • Biology term: Exaptation is when a trait gets optimised for a certain use, but gets highjacked for a different function
      • Bird feathers initially evolved for temperature regulation. Later helped them fly.
    • Gutenberg used the wine screw press (an idea that survived the dark ages) to invent the printing press.
      • Component parts of the printing press had already been invented. The genius, was borrowing a mature technology from a different field, putting it to work to solve an unrelated problem
    • Mutation, error and serendipity.
    • Weak ties are more important than strong ties. You have an idea in one space, you can bring it over to another space. Transfers fast, chance for exaptation.
    • Many of the great inventors had different fields of interest and many hobbies. Overlap can help you solve problems from new angles.
    • Chance favours the connected mind.
  • Platfroms
    • Darwin had to think at different scales of time to solve that problem.
    • Youtube was built on ... javascript, the web and adobe flash for video playback
      • Today 3 people could build youtube in 6 months thanks to the power of platforms
    • You can build using a lot of the software platforms without asking permission. When you can build without asking permission innovation thrives.
    • Make people think differently, by combining and colliding thoughts
    • Platforms can reduce the cost of innovation
    • Linking allows information to flow and be recycled
  • Networked Non-Market environments are great for innovation. Universities are the best model for this we have. Ideas are shared freely but there’s variety and connections
  • So, how do you come up with good ideas?
    • Go for a walk
    • Cultivate hunches
    • Write everything down
    • Keep your folders messy
    • Embrase serendipity
    • Make generative mistakes
    • Take on multiple hobbies
    • Frequent coffee houses and other liquid networks
    • Follow the links
    • Let others build on your ideas
    • Borrow, recycle and reinvent
    • Build a tangled bank?
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Deep Summary

Longer form notes, typically condensed, reworded and de-duplicated.

‣
Darwin’s Paradox
  • A reef, loads of life forms, in the same small area, otherwise poor nutrient water
  • Coral Reefs 0.01% of marine area, but 25% of diversity
  • Law, Living things often have the same number of heartbeats ... small beats faster, faster metabolism - Kleibers Law - due to Negative quarter power scaling
  • Did the same happened to cities?
    • Yes for roads, cables etc
    • No for innovation, creativity
  • A city 10x size of its neighbour was 17x more innovative
  • Grows faster, idea per capita increases
    • As cities get bigger, they generate ideas faster
    • This is Super linear scaling!
    • The average person in a city of 5million was 3x more creative than those in one of 100k
    • What was making them more innovate?
      • Geoffrey West - City power law
  • The 10x10 rule (Innovation then adoption)
    • A decade to build the platform and a decade for mass adoption (colour TV, HD TV)
    • But YouTube took just 2 years (1x1)
  • Darwin needed a book, a ship and a coral reef
  • Many patterns that appear in nature appear in business:
    • Competition - Overstated impact, because it seems more prevalent at the individual and organisational level than it does at the other ones
    • Openness and connectivity are actually more important to the overall development of innovation
  • 7 Patters he identifies
  • Innovation happens at many levels, we overemphasise the ones that we see:
    • Global Evolution, Eco systems, Species, Brains, Cells
    • Ideas, Workspaces, Organisations, Settlements, Information networks
  • Generative environments often have innovation going on at different levels. The city and the coral reef do
  • Better served by connecting ideas than protecting them
‣
Chapter 1: The Adjacent Possible
‣
Example: Infant incubators for the developing world
  • 95% of medical equipment gifted to developing countries is out of order within 5 years. Hard to maintain
  • The solution, design one specifically for the developing world, made from parts they’ll have available (Car parts - headlights etc)
  • Evolution is a tinkerer not an engineer
  • Gradual and relentless pursuit of the adjacent possible. The web started text based, but quickly enabled a whole host of other innovations
  • Things that become possible happen. ‘Sun spots’ were discovered at the same time by 4 scientists in different parts of the world simultaneously
  • Are I nventions are inevitable? Was a study of inventions that happen in 2 places at once, its almost indistinguishable from the list of most important inventions
  • Good ideas don’t come from thin air, they are built out of a collection of existing parts, some are ways of solving problems, some are mechanical parts or technologies, Oxygen was discovered shortly after we had the ability to measure it
  • The adjacent possible is much about limits as it is about openings. The history of cultural progress is almost always in small steps, somebody opening one door that leads to another door. It’s rare for somebody to come up with an idea that enables us to skip a few rooms, they are called ‘ahead of their time’
  • Babbage ideas on computing were so ahead of his time they escaped the adjacent possible, and weren’t realised.
  • YouTube would not have worked 5 or 10 years earlier
  • To innovate, explore the edges of the adjacent possible that exist around you. What kind of environments are good for innovation... those that expose a wide variety of parts and show the adjacent possible, and encourage novel ways of combining those
  • Apollo 13 innovation... was possible because of the constraint of the adjacent possible. They started with everything the astronauts had on the table.
  • Innovation is all about having spare parts that can be combined in new combinations. The key to innovation is not about having big thoughts, but to get more parts on the table.
‣
Chapter 2: Liquid Networks
  • A good idea is better described a network (than a flash, a spark etc)
  • A network of cells that are exploring the adjacent possible connections you can make in your mind.
  • An idea is not a single thing, it is more like a swarm
  • Creating brains look different to brains doing familiar tasks. To make your brain more conducive to making new connections, what environment do you put it in?
  • Carbon atoms have an electron configuration that makes them good at forming connections with lots of things. Therefore, if there’s life elsewhere, its likely going to be carbon based. It was the key to creating the building blocks of life in a lab. One lab experiment simulated an underwater volcano environment, all 22 of key amino acids were created
  • Silicon is OK, but not as good as carbon, silicon bonds also degrade in water
  • Liquid water is also good for creating elements.
  • What drove life and innovation on planet earth?
    1. a capacity to make as many new connections as possible
    2. An environment that makes random connections possible and probable
  • Innovative systems gravitate towards the edge of chaos. Like a metaphor of solid, liquid and gas. A gas is chaotic and ephemeral , a solid is stable and boring but a liquid ... new connections can occur through adjacent connections, the system isn’t so unstable that new creations are destroyed (like in a gas).
  • Liquid networks therefore are the precursor to innovation. It would predict that as soon as humans organised themselves into a kind of liquid network, innovation would follow. Agriculture made it possible to have cities, connections and collaboration. Information spill over. 70k years of innovation. Things happened really slowly, a good idea or break through every 10k years. As soon as we had cities and writing, we created 99% of innovations in the last moment
  • High density liquid networks make it possible for innovation to happen, but they also store accumulated wisdom of human culture
  • Double entry book keeping was a big deal, developed convectively by merchants sharing techniques over time.
  • The market place has more good ideas than the authority, as there are 1000x more brains in the market place
  • Large collectives are rarely capable of innovation. There’s no wisdom of the crowd, its the wisdom of someone in the crowd. Individuals get smarter because they are connected to the network
  • Ideas happen in minds, but minds are in environments.
  • Dunbar studied innovations, most important ideas occurred in regular lab meetings. The group environment helped reconceptualise problems, questions from colleagues challenge assumptions and think about things at a new scale, or in a new way
  • So for good environments, strike the balance between order and chaos
  • Building 20 at MIT was famous for being an innovative place (birthed Bose). It was built cheaply, and easily reconfigured. That’s what made it conducive to innovation
  • Building 99 at Microsoft was designed water cooler first. Room for projects with break out areas, space for concentration work, places for connections etc Information spillover is a feature. Fluidity of ideas, expansion and contraction of teams
‣
Chapter 3: The slow hunch
  • The Phoenix Memo: FBI memo about Osama Bin Laden sending students to the US to learn how to fly planes. Suggested it was a sleeper cell plan. It went to a black hole, labelled as routine and speculative by analysts.
  • Studying both ideas that failed, and those that made helps us understand where good ideas come from
  • Most great ideas come into the world half baked, in a partial incomplete form, they lack a missing element, that missing element might be in somebody else’s head
  • These hunches or early idea, if they don’t connect, they fail
  • 911 was somewhat predicted by 2 different hunches. One about an individual who showed little interest in landing a 747 or getting a job as a pilot, and another that spotted a larger pattern of people of interest going to flying school. If they were put together, we could have solved something . (Phoenix and MinIsota hunches)
  • Most ideas are people searching for a solution to a problem over a long period of time. Sometimes for decades.
  • Slow hunches are easily lost, so they need to be nurtured and cultivated.
  • The slow hunch is the rule. Darwin’s natural selection - he described as a moment of inspiration. Although when you examine all of his notebooks, all the building blocks were there. Variation, competition, changes over time. He almost had all of it, and it took him another year to get it. The idea drifted into his consciousness over time.
  • Write everything down! The notebook platform provides a space for ideas to cultivate. Darwin was constantly re-reading his notes, almost a duet between his past self and present self.
  • Building a second brain was called common placing (100’s of years ago) 1652. Bells common place book. Darwin inherited a common place book.
  • Re reading and re-writing your common place book. You want to be able to find things, but also have freedom to have random thoughts. Too much order can stop new ideas emerging.
  • Tim bernes Lee’s WWW was a slow burn, he was fascinated by encyclopaedias as a child, by tracking colleagues work later, and then connecting documents in networks. No Eureka moment , the web was just a solution to an open challenge. 10 years at CERN, tinkering on the web as a side project, that was somewhat related to his day job... before CERN backed the project.
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Chapter 4: Serendipity
  • A hunch has to connect with other ideas.
  • The more disorganised your brain is, the smarter you are, brain chaos states (vs state mode, when executing a habit)
  • Serendipity is when you discover a missing bit of the puzzle. You need something to hang the ideas off of.
  • How do you create environments that foster serendipity:
    • Seems like a contradiction to try and create serendipity
    • Go for a walk, long showers, bath tubs.
    • There does seem to a pattern, about thinking deeply, then letting go. When letting go, new connections arise and new ideas occurs
    • To cross pollinate ideas, try reading lots of books in a short amount of time. Bill Gates and others have reading holidays. By compressing it into a few days, you give new ideas a chance to network
  • Having a second brain can help serendipity
  • Serendipity is now a mainstream thing, on the web.
  • Newspapers are serendipity machines.
  • Filters reduce serendipity (not native to the web)
  • The information diversity on the web, there’s always something interesting to come across, but there’s almost too much, thats why we have filters.
  • Restrictions on the spread of new ideas (patents) make things worse
  • Closed environments inhibit serendipity
  • Secrecy comes with great cost, turn your R&D labs inside out.
  • Brainstorming - generative ideas. (Its finite in time and space, you need something asynchronous to increase the chance of serendipity)
  • Build information management systems, that allow ideas to persist, disperse and recombine. Create an environment where brainstorming is constantly running in the background, a collective version of the 20% time. Create a database of collective hunches. A suggestion box. Hunches about new ideas, visible to everyone, people can come and build on them. Vote on colleagues suggestions. Idea exchange. Individual and collective. Make them public, give good ideas new ways to connect.
‣
Chapter 5: Error
  • Signal boosting vacuum tube, unlocked computers (manhattan project)
  • Steady consistent accumulation of error led to the invention
  • The pacemaker came from the novel combination of spare parts (used the wrong resistor and it sounded like a heart beat). He'd been thinking about irregular heart beats as a signal transition problem for 5 years prior to that though
    • Slow burn of a problem (always working on a problem)
  • The errors of a great mind, exceed in number those of a less vigorous one
  • Probe at the edges of error, being right keeps you in place, being wrong forces you to explore
  • The error is needed to set off the truth
  • Transform error into insight. Outsiders, not working on a problem, are far more less likely to exist errors as noise, you can conceptualise scenarios where the error might actually be meaningful
  • Subtle mutations in the genetic code is a better recipe for innovation than complete random code generation (most would die after birth)
  • As a species we are dependent on mutation, some scientists believe that evolution has tuned the error rate so its optimal, a balance between stability and too much mutation
  • Evolution didn't close the door on mutation, 1 in 30m base pairs, 150 mutations per person
  • Bacteria increase mutation rates when the environment is more hostile. The opportunity cost of a mutation is lower, if you're going to die in the environment anyway
  • You want to be able to pass on mutation, without passing on genes that make mutation too common, as further mutations will crowd out the successful ones. So you need some stability to allow for evolution
‣
Chapter 6: Weak tie Exaptation
  • Exaptation: the process by which features acquire functions for which they were not originally adapted or selected.
  • Wine screw press invented in Greece, idea survived the dark ages and was used and improved throughout.
  • Gutenberg used the technology to invent the printing press. 1440, goldsmith Johannes Gutenberg
    • Component parts of the printing press had already been invented:
      • Combinatorial innovation (bringing things together in a new way)
      • Movable type, ink, paper and the press had all been developed and invented separately
      • The genius, was borrowing a mature technology from a different field, putting it to work to solve an unrelated problem
  • Biology term: Exaptation is when a trait get optimized for a certain use, but gets highjacked for a different function
    • Bird feathers initially evolved for temperature regulation. Later helped them fly.
  • Exaptation is one of the arguments against the intelligent design argument, of how does something evolve... if its not useful until fully built. Exaptation = chance and happy accidents part of the possibility pool
  • Mutation, error and serendipity
  • Punch cards were invented for looms but were used to program early computers
  • The history of the WWW is exaptation. The invention possessed many unintended qualities.
  • Big cities allow subcultures to thrive, as they reach critical mass in cities. They atrophy in smaller communities. This in turn, can attract like minded people to the city. In a suburb, there are not enough people to support unique shops or experiences in small suburban towns.
  • Subcultures create new ideas that diffuse through society and into other groups. Think about the homebrew club in silicon valley. The feeling of support and sharing in those groups makes everyone in them more invested.
  • Weak ties are more important than strong ties. You have an idea in one space, you can bring it over to another space. Transfers fast, chance for exaptation.
  • If open and dense networks lead to innovation, then how do you explain apple? Which is top down and closed?
    • The internal structure at apple is designed to bring teams together. Apple development cycle is more like a coffee house than a production line. Normally, you have an idea, that gets chipped away at over time, as it moves through different teams. The apple way of doing things is in parallel, teams from across the company are involved from day one.
  • Many of the great inventors had different fields of interest and many hobbies. Overlap can help you solve problems from new angles.
  • Chance favors the connected mind.
‣
Chapter 7: Platforms
  • Darwin had a theory that volcanic islands often stopped about sea level. He couldn't figure out why, then he realised it was coral that was the reason. As volcanic mountains were sinking/eroded away, they created habitats for coral, that would grow faster than the mountains would erode, but not above the surface
  • Darwin had to think at different scales of time to solve that problem.
  • Coral reefs are a platform, they breed so much variety of life. Ecosystem engineers.
  • GPS was invented, by a couple of scientists that were listening out for sputnik, to see if they could use the doppler effect to see where it is and how fast it was going. They realised they could use the same technology in reverse to locate a receiver on earth if they knew the location of the satellite. GPS became a platform for common good.
  • Make people think differently, by combining and colliding thoughts
  • GPS. The web. Roads.
  • Youtube was... javascript, the web and adobe flash for video playback
  • 3 people could build youtube in 6 months thanks to the power of platforms
  • Genres - are a little fuzzy
  • Twitter is a platform, many use other apps to interact with it.
  • Twitter.com came after the open apis that they built. Its a way of outsourcing innovation
  • Platforms can reduce the cost of innovation
  • Cities can recycle spaces. Old industries dies, new ones can take their old space.
  • Old ideas can sometimes use new buildings, new ideas must use old buildings
  • Linking allows information to flow and be recycled
  • You can build using a lot of the software platforms without asking permission. When you can build without asking permission innovation thrives.
‣
Conclusion
‣
The 4th quadrant
  • Carrier was the inventor of the air conditioning system, wasn't initially about humidity not cooling
  • But in the invention changed what parts of the world were actually habitable
  • Carrier's story didn't touch on the previous themes discussed in this book
  • The quadrants
    • image
  • Adapted from
  • Decentralised non market environments.
  • Networked is clearly better than individuals.
  • Non-market is better than market
  • Collective inventions are more common. Multiple firms to create something.
  • Financial rewards in a system means you get secrecy and protectionism
  • Universities are essentially the non-market, networked environment
  • The natural state of ideas is flow, spillover and connection. The free flow of ideas is natural.
‣
Closing paragraph:
  • Go for a walk
  • Cultivate hunches
  • Write everything down
  • Keep your folders messy
  • Embrase serendipity
  • Make generative mistakes
  • Take on multiple hobbies
  • Frequent coffee houses and other liquid networks
  • Follow the links
  • Let others build on your ideas
  • Borrow, recycle and reinvent
  • Build a tangled bank?