Where Good Ideas Come From :
The Natural History of Innovation
Author - Steven Johnson
Note from Steven Johnson about his book -
I’ve been working on this one for almost five years now, though in some ways the idea for it is almost a decade old. The subject of the book is right there in the title: it’s a book that tries to grapple with the question of why certain environments seem to be disproportionately skilled at generating and sharing good ideas. It’s a book, in other words, about the space of creativity. Part of the fun of it—though also the challenge of writing it—is that I look at both cultural and natural systems in the book. So I look at human environments that have been unusually generative: the architecture of successful science labs, the information networks of the Web or the Enlightenment-era postal system, the public spaces of metropolitan cities, even the notebooks of great thinkers. But I also look at natural environments that have been biologically innovative: the coral reef and the rain forest, or the chemical soups that first gave birth to life’s good idea.
The book is built around dozens of stories from the history of scientific, technological and cultural innovation: how Darwin’s "eureka moment" about natural selection turned out to be a myth; how Brian Eno invented a new musical convention by listening to too much AM radio; how Gutenberg borrowed a crucial idea from the wine industry to invent modern printing; why GPS was accidentally developed by a pair of twenty-somethings messing around with a microwave receiver; how a design team has created a infant incubator made entirely out of spare automobile parts. But I have also tried to distill some meaningful—and hopefully useful—lessons out of all these stories, and so I’ve isolated seven distinct patterns that appear again and again in all these innovative environments. (Each pattern gets its own chapter.) If it works, you should walk away from it as a reader not just with some interesting anecdotes about the amazing biodiversity of a coral reef, or the invention of the vacuum tube, but with something hopefully a bit more practical: ideas for making your own spaces—where you work, where you think, where you pursue your hobbies, where you read—more innovative as well.