Where Good Ideas Come From

by Steven Johnson

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.

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”: if creativity scaled with size in a straight, linear fashion, you would of course find more patents and inventions in a larger city, but the number of patents and inventions per capita would be stable.

despite all the noise and crowding and distraction, the average resident of a metropolis with a population of five million people was almost three times more creative than the average resident of a town of a hundred thousand.

Does this growth of creativity coincide with data sets getting larger? Do more files and more available data result in more innovation under the right conditions?

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

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.

we can understand something better by studying its behavior in different contexts.

As you descend toward the center of the glass, the biological scales contract: from the global, deep time of evolution to the microscopic exchanges of neurons or DNA. At the center of the glass, the perspective shifts from nature to culture, and the scales widen: from individual thoughts and private workspaces to immense cities and global information networks.

If there is a single maxim that runs through this book’s arguments, it is that we are often better served by connecting ideas than we are by protecting them.

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.

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.

the building blocks that create—and limit—the space of possibility for a specific problem.

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.

Carbon atoms measure only 0.03 percent of the overall composition of the earth’s crust, and yet they make up nearly 20 percent of our body mass. That abundance highlights the unique property of the carbon atom: its combinatorial power. Carbon is a connector.

The computer scientist Christopher Langton observed several decades ago that innovative systems have a tendency to gravitate toward the “edge of chaos”: the fertile zone between too much order and too much anarchy.

no matter how smart the “authorities” may be, if they are outnumbered a thousand to one by the marketplace, there will be more good ideas lurking in the market than in the feudal castle.

In 1964, Arthur Koestler published his epic account of innovation’s roots, The Act of Creation. The book was an attempt to explain how breakthrough ideas in science and art come about. (Koestler also had a long opening section on humor, which he believed was closely related to the more erudite inspiration of the poets and physicists.)

Thomas Kuhn’s even more influential book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions had been published two years before The Act of Creation.

The group environment helped recontextualize problems, as questions from colleagues forced researchers to think about their experiments on a different scale or level.

part of the secret of hunch cultivation is simple: write everything down.

Scholars, amateur scientists, aspiring men of letters—just about anyone with intellectual ambition in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was likely to keep a commonplace book. The great minds of the period—Milton, Bacon, Locke—were zealous believers in the memory-enhancing powers of the commonplace book. In its most customary form, “commonplacing,” as it was called, involved transcribing interesting or inspirational passages from one’s reading, assembling a personalized encyclopedia of quotations. There is a distinct self-help quality to the early descriptions of commonplacing’s virtues: maintaining the books enabled one to “lay up a fund of knowledge, from which we may at all times select what is useful in the several pursuits of life.”

You need a system for capturing hunches, but not necessarily categorizing them, because categories can build barriers between disparate ideas, restrict them to their own conceptual islands.

What we gave up in speed and simplicity, we made up for in creativity.

I keep all these quotes in a database using a program called DEVONthink, where I also store my own writing: chapters, essays, blog posts, notes. By combining my own words with passages from other sources, the collection becomes something more than just a file storage system. It becomes a digital extension of my imperfect memory, an archive of all my old ideas, and the ideas that have influenced me.

Before long, a larger idea takes shape in my head, built upon the trail of associations the machine has assembled for me. Compare that to the traditional way of exploring your files, where the computer is like a dutiful, but dumb, butler: “Find me that document about the chimpanzees!” That’s searching. The other feels radically different, so different that we don’t quite have a verb for it: it’s riffing, or exploring. There are false starts and red herrings, but there are just as many happy accidents and unexpected discoveries. Indeed, the fuzziness of the results is part of what makes the software so powerful. The serendipity of the system emerges out of two distinct forces. First, there is the connective power of the semantic algorithm, which is smart but also slightly unpredictable, thus creating a small amount of randomizing noise that makes the results more surprising.

Consider this representative elegy to the “endangered joy of serendipity,” authored by a journalism professor named William McKeen: Think about the library. Do people browse anymore? We have become such a directed people. We can target what we want, thanks to the Internet. Put a couple of key words into a search engine and you find—with an irritating hit or miss here and there—exactly what you’re looking for. It’s efficient, but dull. You miss the time-consuming but enriching act of looking through shelves, of pulling down a book because the title interests you, or the binding . . . Looking for something and being surprised by what you find—even if it’s not what you set out looking for—is one of life’s great pleasures, and so far no software exists that can duplicate that experience.

One trouble with brainstorming is that it is finite in both time and space: a group gathers for an hour in a room, or for a daylong corporate retreat, they toss out a bunch of crazy ideas, and then the meeting disperses. Sometimes a useful connection emerges, but too often the relevant hunches aren’t in sync with one another. One employee has a promising hunch in one office, and two months later, another employee comes up with the missing piece that turns that hunch into a genuine insight.

Instead of cloistering your hunches in brainstorm sessions or R&D labs, create an environment where brainstorming is something that is constantly running in the background, throughout the organization, a collective version of the 20-percent-time concept that proved so successful for Google and 3M.

One way to do this is to create an open database of hunches, the Web 2.0 version of the traditional suggestion box.

A public hunch database makes every passing idea visible to everyone else in the organization, not just management. Other employees can comment or expand on those ideas, connecting them with their own hunches about new products or priorities or internal organizational changes. Some systems even allow employees to vote on their colleagues’ sugg...

The British economist William Stanley Jevons, who had firsthand experience as an inventor himself, described the prominence of error in his Principles of Science, first published in 1874: It would be an error to suppose that the great discoverer seizes at once upon the truth, or has any unerring method of divining it. In all probability the errors of the great mind exceed in number those of the less vigorous one. Fertility of imagination and abundance of guesses at truth are among the first requisites of discovery; but the erroneous guesses must be many times as numerous as those that prove well founded. The weakest analogies, the most whimsical notions, the most apparently absurd theories, may pass through the teeming brain, and no record remain of more than the hundredth part.

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

It is a fitting footnote to the story that Watson and Crick were notorious for taking long, rambling coffee breaks, where they tossed around ideas in a more playful setting outside the lab—a practice that was generally scorned by their more fastidious colleagues. With their weak-tie connections to disparate fields, and their exaptative intelligence, Watson and Crick worked their way to a Nobel Prize in their own private coffeehouse.

Apple’s approach, by contrast, is messier and more chaotic at the beginning, but it avoids this chronic problem of good ideas being hollowed out as they progress through the development chain. Apple calls it concurrent or parallel production. 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.

Chance favors the connected mind.

To date, attempts to measure accurately the full diversity of reef ecosystems have been foiled by the complexity of these habitats; scientists now believe that somewhere between a million and ten million distinct species live in coral reefs around the world, despite the fact that those reefs only occupy one-tenth of one percent of the planet’s surface.

Jefferson waxes philosophical on the nature of ideas themselves: Stable ownership is the gift of social law, and is given late in the progress of society. It would be curious then, if an idea, the fugitive fermentation of an individual brain, could, of natural right, be claimed in exclusive and stable property. If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. 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.

This is the ultimate explanation of Darwin’s Paradox: the reef has unlocked so many doors of the adjacent possible because of the way it shares.

The reef helps us understand the other riddles we began with: the runaway innovation of cities, and of the Web. They, too, are environments that compulsively connect and remix that most valuable of resources: information.

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.