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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.
Something about the environment of a big city was making its residents significantly more innovative than residents of smaller towns. But what was it?
took ten years for color TV to go from the fringes to the mainstream; two generations later, it took HDTV just as long to achieve mass success.
Call it the 10/10 rule: a decade to build the new platform, and a decade for it to find a mass audience.
But even with all those extra layers of innovation, YouTube went from idea to mass adoption in less than two years. Something about the Web environment had enabled Hurley, Chen, and Karim to unleash a good idea on the world with astonishing speed. They took the 10/10 rule and made it 1/1.
What we lack is a unified theory that describes the common attributes shared by all those innovation systems.
The long-zoom approach lets us see that openness and connectivity may, in the end, be more valuable to innovation than purely competitive mechanisms.
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.
“the adjacent possible.” The phrase captures both the limits and the creative potential of change and innovation.
The adjacent possible is a kind of shadow future, hovering on the edges of the present state of things, a map of all the ways in which the present can reinvent itself. Yet is it not an infinite space, or a totally open playing field.
The strange and beautiful truth about the adjacent possible is that its boundaries grow as you explore those boundaries.
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.
technological (and scientific) advances rarely break out of the adjacent possible; the history of cultural progress is, almost without exception, a story of one door leading to another door, exploring the palace one room at a time.
trying to create an Analytical Engine in 1850—or YouTube in 1995—was the equivalent of those fatty acids trying to self-organize into a sea urchin. The idea was right, but the environment wasn’t ready for it yet.
We are, each of us, surrounded by the conceptual equivalent of those Toyota spare parts, all waiting to be recombined into something magical, something new.
The trick is to figure out ways to explore the edges of possibility that surround you. This can be as simple as changing the physical environment you work in, or cultivating a specific kind of social network, or maintaining certain habits in the way you seek out and store information.
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 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.
A good idea is a network.
First, the sheer size of the network: you can’t have an epiphany with only three neurons firing. The network needs to be densely populated.
to make your mind more innovative, you have to place it inside environments that share that same network signature: networks of ideas or people that mimic the neural networks of a mind exploring the boundaries of the adjacent possible.
a capacity to make new connections with as many other elements as possible. And, second, a “randomizing” environment that encourages collisions between all the elements in the system.
On earth, at least, the story of life’s creativity begins with a liquid, high-density network: connection-hungry carbon atoms colliding with other elements in the primordial soup.
“information spillover.” When you share a common civic culture with thousands of other people, good ideas have a tendency to flow from mind to mind, even when their creators try to keep them secret. “Spillover”
In a low-density, chaotic network, ideas come and go. In the dense networks of the first cities, good ideas have a natural propensity to get into circulation.
One of the essential instruments in the creation of modern capitalism appears to have been developed collectively, circulating through the liquid networks of Italy’s cities.
It’s not that the network itself is smart; it’s that the individuals get smarter because they’re connected to the network.
an image in our heads of the scientist alone in the lab, hunched over a microscope, and stumbling across a major new finding. But Dunbar’s study showed that those isolated eureka moments were rarities.
even with all the advanced technology of a leading molecular biology lab, the most productive tool for generating good ideas remains a circle of humans at a table, talking shop.
most great ideas first take shape in a partial, incomplete form. They have the seeds of something profound, but they lack a key element that can turn the hunch into something truly powerful.
Most hunches that turn into important innovations unfold over much longer time frames.
Sustaining the slow hunch is less a matter of perspiration than of cultivation. You give the hunch enough nourishment to keep it growing, and plant it in fertile soil, where its roots can make new connections. And then you give it time to bloom.
And yet somehow Darwin fails to understand that he has the solution at his fingertips, and continues his enquiry for another year before “getting a theory by which to work.”
Most slow hunches never last long enough to turn into something useful, because they pass in and out of our memory too quickly, precisely because they possess a certain murkiness.
hunches, but not necessarily categorizing them, because categories can build barriers between disparate ideas, restrict them to their own conceptual islands.
The Web arose as the answer to an open challenge, through the swirling together of influences, ideas, and realizations from many sides, until, by the wondrous offices of the human mind, a new concept jelled. It was a process of accretion, not the linear solving of one problem after another.
occurred to him that it would be useful to create a software tool that could organize all those stories into useful clusters of relevance, so that you could see at a glance all the latest stories from around the Web about the search for bin Laden, or the cleanup efforts at Ground Zero, or the Bush administration’s case for military retaliation.
But for that hunch to blossom into something more substantial, it has to connect with other ideas.
during REM sleep acetylcholine-releasing cells in the brain stem fire indiscriminately, sending surges of electricity billowing out across the brain.
Memories and associations are triggered in a chaotic, semirandom fashion, creating the hallucinatory quality of dreams.
the dream is not somehow unveiling a repressed truth. Instead, it is exploring, trying to find new truths by experimenting with novel combinations of neurons.
The work of dreams turns out to be a particularly chaotic, yet productive, way of exploring the adjacent possible.
In part, his epiphany was made possible by the random connections of REM sleep. Yet it was also made possible by a slow hunch that had been lingering in the back of his mind for almost two decades.
the brain also seems to require the opposite: regular periods of electrical chaos, where neurons are completely out of sync with each other.
have a solid explanation for the brain’s chaos states, but Thatcher and other researchers
would otherwise fail to connect in more orderly settings. The phase-lock
Serendipity needs unlikely collisions and discoveries, but it also needs something to anchor those discoveries.
surprising connections that might help you unlock a door in the adjacent possible. But how do you get those particular clusters of neurons to fire at the right time?
One way is to go for a walk. The history of innovation is replete with stories of good ideas that occurred to people while they were out on a stroll.
“During a period of apparent rest and unconscious work, certain of them are detached from the wall and put in motion. They flash in every direction through the space . . . where they are enclosed, as would, for example, a swarm of gnats or, if you prefer a more learned comparison, like the molecules of gas in the kinematic theory of gases. Then their mutual impacts may produce new combinations.”
