Where Good Ideas Come from: The Natural History of Innovation

by Steven Johnson

Extract ten thousand cubic feet of water from just about anywhere in the Indian Ocean and do a full inventory on the life you find there: the list would be about as “poor” as Darwin’s account of the land animals of the Keelings. You might find a dozen fish if you were lucky. On the reef, you would be guaranteed a thousand.

Coral reefs make up about one-tenth of one percent of the earth’s surface, and yet roughly a quarter of the known species of marine life make their homes there.

After a formidable series of measurements in his Davis lab, Kleiber discovered that this scaling phenomenon stuck to an unvarying mathematical script called “negative quarter-power scaling.”

After a formidable series of measurements in his Davis lab, Kleiber discovered that this scaling phenomenon stuck to an unvarying mathematical script called “negative quarter-power scaling.”

If you plotted mass versus metabolism on a logarithmic grid, the result was a perfectly straight line that led from rats and pigeons all the way up to bulls and hippopotami.

The math is simple enough: you take the square root of 1,000, which is (approximately) 31, and then take the square root of 31, which is (again, approximately) 5.5. This means that a cow, which is roughly a thousand times heavier than a woodchuck, will, on average, live 5.5 times longer, and have a heart rate that is 5.5 times slower than the woodchuck’s.

As the science writer George Johnson once observed, one lovely consequence of Kleiber’s law is that the number of heartbeats per lifetime tends to be stable from species to species. Bigger animals just take longer to use up their quota.

Kleiber’s law proved that as life gets bigger, it slows down. But West’s model demonstrated one crucial way in which human-built cities broke from the patterns of biological life: as cities get bigger, they generate ideas at a faster clip. This is what we call “superlinear scaling”:

Call it the 10/10 rule: a decade to build the new platform, and a decade for it to find a mass audience.

This is a book about the space of innovation. Some environments squelch new ideas; some environments seem to breed them effortlessly. The city and the Web have been such engines of innovation because, for complicated historical reasons, they are both environments that are powerfully suited for the creation, diffusion, and adoption of good ideas.

Our thought shapes the spaces we inhabit, and our spaces return the favor.

When life gets creative, it has a tendency to gravitate toward certain recurring patterns, whether those patterns are emergent and self-organizing, or whether they are deliberately crafted by human agents.

Traveling across these different environments and scales is not merely intellectual tourism.

Sealed-beam headlights supplied the crucial warmth; dashboard fans provided filtered air circulation; door chimes sounded alarms.

The lifeless earth was dominated by a handful of basic molecules: ammonia, methane, water, carbon dioxide, a smattering of amino acids, and other simple organic compounds.

The scientist Stuart Kauffman has a suggestive name for the set of all those first-order combinations: “the adjacent possible.”

Basic fatty acids will naturally self-organize into spheres lined with a dual layer of molecules, very similar to the membranes that define the boundaries of modern cells. Once the fatty acids combine to form those bounded spheres, a new wing of the adjacent possible opens up, because those molecules implicitly create a fundamental division between the inside and outside of the sphere. This division is the very essence of a cell.

A brilliant idea occurs to a scientist or inventor somewhere in the world, and he goes public with his remarkable finding, only to discover that three other minds had independently come up with the same idea in the past year.

Good ideas are not conjured out of thin air; they are built out of a collection of existing parts, the composition of which expands (and, occasionally, contracts) over time.

The trick to having good ideas is not to sit around in glorious isolation and try to think big thoughts. The trick is to get more parts on the table.

The creating brain behaves differently from the brain that is performing a repetitive task. The neurons communicate in different ways. The networks take on distinct shapes.

(Even the famously inert gold is soluble in seawater if you give it enough time.)

The most striking discovery in Dunbar’s study turned out to be the physical location where most of the important breakthroughs occurred.

the most productive tool for generating good ideas remains a circle of humans at a table, talking shop.

Those interconnections nurture great ideas, because most great ideas come into the world half-baked, more hunch than revelation. Genuine insights are hard to come by;

Inventing the World Wide Web involved my growing realization that there was a power in arranging ideas in an unconstrained, weblike way.

Were there chemical soups in the brain, or sparks? The answer turned out to be: both. Neurons send electrical signals down the long cables of their axons, which connect to other neurons via small synaptic gaps. When the electrical charge reaches the synapse, it releases a chemical messenger—a neurotransmitter, like dopamine or serotonin—that floats across to the receiving neuron and ultimately triggers another electrical charge, which travels out to other neurons in the brain.

This is what neuroscientists call phase-locking. There is a kind of beautiful synchrony to phase-locking—millions of neurons pulsing in perfect rhythm.

Asexual organisms reproduce on average twice as quickly as their sexual counterparts, in part because without a male/female distinction, every organism is capable of producing offspring directly.

Serendipity needs unlikely collisions and discoveries, but it also needs something to anchor those discoveries.

Given enough time, your mind will often stumble across some old connection that it had long overlooked, and you experience that delightful feeling of private serendipity: Why didn’t I think of that before?

Reading remains an unsurpassed vehicle for the transmission of interesting new ideas and perspectives.

The inventions of radiography, vulcanized rubber, and plastic all depended on generative mistakes that were generative precisely because they connected to slow hunches in the minds of their creators.

good ideas are more likely to emerge in environments that contain a certain amount of noise and error.

A good idea has to be correct on some basic level, and we value good ideas because they tend to have a high signal-to-noise ratio. But that doesn’t mean you want to cultivate those ideas in noise-free environments, because noise-free environments end up being too sterile and predictable in their output.

The best innovation labs are always a little contaminated.

exaptation. An organism develops a trait optimized for a specific use, but then the trait gets hijacked for a completely different function.

A tool that helps you see in one context ends up helping you keep warm in another. That’s the essence of exaptation.

In evolutionary terms, the vacuum tube was originally adapted to make signals louder, but it was eventually exapted to turn those signals into information: zeros and ones that could be manipulated in astonishing ways.

“all decisive events in the history of scientific thought can be described in terms of mental cross-fertilization between different disciplines.”

“Criminal unconventionality and innovative (e.g., artistic) unconventionality are both nourished by vibrant subcultures.”

As Fischer puts it, “The larger the town, the more likely it is to contain, in meaningful numbers and unity, drug addicts, radicals, intellectuals, ‘swingers,’ health-food faddists, or whatever; and the more likely they are to influence (as well as offend) the conventional center of the society.”

That physical proximity made the space rich with exaptation: the literary stream of consciousness influencing the dizzying new perspectives of cubism; the futurist embrace of technological speed in poetry shaping new patterns of urban planning.

The model of weak-tie exaptation also helps us understand the classic story of twentieth-century scientific epiphany: Watson and Crick’s discovery of the double-helix structure of DNA.

“Once key ideas from idea-spaces that otherwise had little contact with one another were connected, they began, quasi-autonomously, to make new sense in terms of one another, leading to the emergence of a whole that was more than the sum of its parts.”

The coffeehouse model of creativity helps explain one of those strange paradoxes of twenty-first-century business innovation.

All the groups—design, manufacturing, engineering, sales—meet continuously through the product-development cycle, brainstorming, trading ideas and solutions, strategizing over the most pressing issues, and generally keeping the conversation open to a diverse group of perspectives.

The process is noisy and involves far more open-ended and contentious meetings than traditional production cycles—and far more dialogue between people versed in different disciplines, with all the translation difficulties that creates. But the results speak for themselves.

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.

It is tempting to call this mode of work “serial tasking,” in the sense that the projects rotate one after the other, but emphasizing the serial nature of the work obscures one crucial aspect of this mental environment: in a slow multitasking mode, one project takes center stage for a series of hours or days, yet the other projects linger in the margins of consciousness throughout. That cognitive overlap is what makes this mode so innovative.