Where Good Ideas Come From

by Steven Johnson

The problem with assimilating new ideas at the fringes of your daily routine is that the potential combinations are limited by the reach of your memory.

then they take off for a week or two and do a deep dive into the words they’ve stockpiled. By compressing their intake into a matter of days, they give new ideas additional opportunities to network among themselves, for the simple reason that it’s easier to remember something that you read yesterday than it is to remember something you read six months ago.

Modern indexing software like DEVONthink’s learns associations between individual words by tracking the frequency with which words appear near each other.

DEVONthink takes the strange but generative combinations of the dream state and turns them into software.

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.

“digital age is stamping out serendipity.”

If the architecture of serendipity lies in stumbling across surprising connections while scanning the front page, then the Web is more than ten times as serendipitous as the classic print newspaper.

“Someone just told me about x and I know nothing about it, but it sounds interesting. Tell me more.” This is the subtle way in which Google supports the serendipitous aspects of the Web.

But often that investment is directly correlated with your ignorance about the topic at hand:

The problem with these closed environments is that they inhibit serendipity and reduce the overall network of minds that can potentially engage with a problem.

The secret to organizational inspiration is to build information networks that allow hunches to persist and disperse and recombine.

The history of being spectacularly right has a shadow history lurking behind it: a much longer history of being spectacularly wrong, again and again.

Greatbatch stored the idea in the back of his head for the next five years, where it lingered as a slow hunch.

“The errors of the great mind exceed in number those of the less vigorous one.” This is not merely statistics.

De Forest was wrong about the utility of gas as a detector, but he kept probing at the edges of that error, until he hit upon something that was genuinely useful. Being right keeps you in place. Being wrong forces you to explore.

When we’re wrong, we have to challenge our assumptions, adopt new strategies. Being wrong on its own doesn’t unlock new doors in the adjacent possible, but it does force us to look for them.

The groups that had been deliberately contaminated with erroneous information ended up making more original connections than the groups that had only been given pure information.

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

We need the phase-lock state for the same reason we need truth: a world of complete error and chaos would be unmanageable, on a social and a neurochemical level.

Innovative environments thrive on useful mistakes, and suffer when the demands of quality control overwhelm them.

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

A platform adapted for scholarship was exapted for shopping, and sharing photos, and watching pornography—along with a thousand other uses that would have astounded Berners-Lee when he created his first HTML-based directories in the early nineties.

Lifestyles or interests that deviate from the mainstream need critical mass to survive; they atrophy in smaller communities not because those communities are more repressive, but rather because the odds of finding like-minded people are much lower with a smaller pool of individuals.

Both Fischer and Jacobs emphasize the fertile interactions that occur between subcultures in a dense city center, the inevitable spillover that happens whenever human beings crowd together in large groups.

What Ruef discovered was a ringing endorsement of the coffeehouse model of social networking: the most creative individuals in Ruef’s survey consistently had broad social networks that extended outside their organization and involved people from diverse fields of expertise.

Diverse, horizontal social networks, in Ruef’s analysis, were three times more innovative than uniform, vertical networks. In groups united by shared values and long-term familiarity, conformity

“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.”

That cognitive overlap is what makes this mode so innovative. The current project can exapt ideas from the projects at the margins, make new connections. It is not so much a question of thinking outside the box, as it is allowing the mind to move through multiple boxes.

But modern scientific paradigms are rarely overthrown. Instead, they are built upon. They create a platform that supports new paradigms above them.

The Twitter team took the exact opposite approach. They built the API first, and exposed all the data that was crucial to the service, and then they built Twitter.com on top of the API.

Two things we have in abundance on this planet right now are pollution and seawater. Why not try to build a city out of them?

a funny way, the real benefit of stacked platforms lies in the knowledge you no longer need to have. You don’t need to know how to send signals to satellites or parse geo-data to send that tweet circulating through the Web’s ecosystem.

economic incentives have a much more complicated relationship to the development and adoption of good ideas than we usually imagine.

where innovation is concerned, we have deliberately built inefficient markets: environments that protect copyrights and patents and trade secrets and a thousand other barricades we’ve erected to keep promising ideas out of the minds of others.

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.