Where Good Ideas Come from: The Natural History of Innovation

by Steven Johnson

That movement from box to box forces the mind to approach intellectual roadblocks from new angles, or to borrow tools from one discipline to solve problems in another.

Chance favors the connected mind.

It is one of the strange ironies of marine biology that the coral’s essential contribution to the undersea ecosystem takes place after its death. The polyp builds a calcium-based exoskeleton during its life, producing a mineral called aragonite, which is sturdy enough to remain intact centuries after its original host has perished.

Published several years later as a monograph, Darwin’s theory of atoll formation marked his first significant contribution to science, and it has largely stood the test of time.

The idea itself drew on a coffeehouse of different disciplines: to solve the mystery, he had to think like a naturalist, a marine biologist, and a geologist all at once.

For forty years, ecologists have used the term “keystone species” to designate an organism that has a disproportionate impact on its ecosystem—a carnivore, for instance, who is the only predator of another species that would otherwise overwhelm the habitat with unchecked population growth.

First observed more than a century before by the Austrian physicist Christian Doppler, the Doppler effect describes the predictable way a waveform’s frequency changes when the source or the receiver is in motion.

Genres supply a set of implicit rules that have enough coherence that traditionalists can safely play inside them, and more adventurous artists can confound our expectations by playing with them.

Genres are the platforms and paradigms of the creative world.

It’s like inventing a toaster oven and then looking around a year later and discovering that all your customers have, on their own, figured out a way to turn it into a microwave.

On an open platform, good ideas can come from anywhere.

If Brent Constantz has his way, the coral reef’s genius for recycling and platform building will end up transforming the physical platforms of human settlements. In the late seventies, while pursuing a Darwinesque double major in biology and geology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, Constantz became fascinated by the coral polyp’s extraordinary powers of biomineralization, its ability to build an immense structure of calcium carbonate durable enough to last for millions of years. Human beings may be justifiably proud of venerable engineering achievements like the Pyramids or the Great Wall of China, but those monuments pale in comparison to the Great Barrier Reef, the largest biological structure on the planet.

“If you could somehow capture these skeleton growth processes,” he thought, “you could really help all those old ladies with broken hips.”

where for the first time he learned about the mammoth environmental impact of manufacturing Portland cement, the third largest source of human-created carbon dioxide emissions on the planet.

The information is not simply flowing in this system; it’s being recycled and put to new uses, transformed by a diverse network of other species in the ecosystem, each with its own distinct function.

You can dive deeply into a single story and try to persuade your audience that it is representative of a larger societal truth.

The second approach, which I have taken in the preceding chapters of this book, is to build an argument around dozens of anecdotes, drawn from different contexts and historical periods. The anecdotal approach sacrifices detail for breadth. Yet it, too, runs the risk of being accused of cherry-picking.

Berners-Lee needed the open platform of the Internet for his hypertext creation to take flight, and thus the many individuals who built ARPANET and TCP/IP should be understood as essential contributors to the Web. Had those platforms been more proprietary ones—say, by charging licensing fees for the privilege of developing on top of them—it’s entirely possible that Berners-Lee wouldn’t have bothered creating the Web in the first place, given that it was a side project that his superiors knew next to nothing about.

It is in the nature of good ideas to stand on the shoulders of the giants who came before them, which means that by some measure, every important innovation is fundamentally a network affair.

What happens when you take the distant approaching to reading novels is that you’re able to see patterns that simply aren’t visible on the scale of paragraphs and pages, or even entire books.

All of the patterns of innovation we have observed in the previous chapters—liquid networks, slow hunches, serendipity, noise, exaptation, emergent platforms—do best in open environments where ideas flow in unregulated channels.

It is interesting to contemplate a tangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent upon each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us … Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life …

That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property.

Ideas are intrinsically copyable in the way that food and fuel are not. You have to build dams to keep ideas from flowing.

There are good ideas, and then there are good ideas that make it easier to have other good ideas.

Generative platforms require all the patterns of innovation we have seen over the preceding pages; they need to create a space where hunches and serendipitous collisions and exaptations and recycling can thrive. It is possible to create such a space in a walled garden.

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.