Where Good Ideas Come From

by Steven Johnson

When the Renaissance finally blossomed, more than a millennium after Pliny’s demise, Europe had to rediscover Ptolemaic astronomy and the secrets of building aqueducts. But they didn’t have to relearn how to press grapes.

Gutenberg’s printing press was a classic combinatorial innovation, more bricolage than breakthrough.

An important part of Gutenberg’s genius, then, lay not in conceiving an entirely new technology from scratch, but instead from borrowing a mature technology from an entirely different field, and putting it to work to solve an unrelated problem.

exaptation. An organism develops a trait optimized for a specific use, but then the trait gets hijacked for a completely different function. The classic example, featured prominently in Gould and Vrba’s essay, is bird feathers, which we believe initially evolved for temperature regulation,

A feather adapted for warmth is now exapted for flight.

natural selection has the Nairobi cobbler’s instinct for taking old parts and putting them to new uses.

The literary historian Franco Moretti has persuasively documented the role of exaptation in the evolution of the novel.

big cities nurture subcultures much more effectively than suburbs or small towns.

clustering creates a positive feedback loop, as the more unconventional residents of the suburbs or rural areas migrate to the city in search of fellow travelers.

Poetry collectives and street gangs might seem miles apart on the surface, but they each depend on the city’s capacity for nurturing subcultures.

The cultural diversity those subcultures create is valuable not just because it makes urban life less boring. The value also lies in the unlikely migrations that happen between the different clusters.

encouragement does not necessarily lead to creativity. Collisions do—the collisions that happen when different fields of expertise converge in some shared physical or intellectual space. That’s where the true sparks fly.

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.

Exaptation also prospers on another scale: the shared media environment of a physical community.

My Life in the Bush of Ghosts marked the birth of a certain historically crucial kind of musical borrowing: it was not just a new music, but a whole new way of thinking about what music could be built out of.

it is crucial to the story that Eno was not, technically speaking, alone with his tape recorder: he was tapped into a network of wildly different voices, all of them ranting at different frequencies. Eno didn’t need a coffeehouse. He had AM radio.

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.

what the innovation scholar Richard Ogle calls an “idea-space”: a complex of tools, beliefs, metaphors, and objects of study. A new technology developed in one idea-space can migrate over to another idea-space through these long-distance connections; in that new environment, the technology may turn out to have unanticipated properties, or may trigger a connection that leads to a new breakthrough.

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

the company that is consistently ranked as the most innovative in the world—Apple—remains defiantly top-down and almost comically secretive in its development of new products.

Apple’s development cycle looks more like a coffeehouse than an assembly line.

Apple calls it concurrent or parallel production.

Many of history’s great innovators managed to build a cross-disciplinary coffeehouse environment within their own private work routines.

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.

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.

Chance favors the connected mind.

Darwin, like most geologists of his age, knew that the oceans were populated by a huge number of tropical atolls that had all somehow simultaneously landed within a few feet of sea level.

the ground beneath Darwin’s feet was not the product of geological forces. An organism had engineered it.

A coral reef, then, is a kind of vast underwater mausoleum: millions of skeletons united to form the pocked, labyrinthine sprawl of a reef.

Because the mountain is subsiding so slowly, the coral are able to build their reefs faster than the mountain can descend.

As the original peak descends further and further into the sea, the older reefs die off, but continue to give structural support to the new, thriving reefs above them.

a coral reef is a platform in a much more profound sense: the mounds, plates, and crevices of the reef create a habitat for millions of other species, an undersea metropolis of immense diversity.

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. This is the Darwin Paradox: that such nutrient-poor waters could generate so much marvelous, improbable, heterogeneous life.

a very specific kind of keystone species: the kind that actually creates the habitat itself. Jones called these organisms “ecosystem engineers.”

Platform building is, by definition, a kind of exercise in emergent behavior. The tiny Scleractinia polyp isn’t actively trying to create an underwater Las Vegas, but nonetheless out of its steady labor—imbibing algae and erecting those aragonite skeletons—a higher-level system emerges.

The platform builders and ecosystem engineers do not just open a door in the adjacent possible. They build an entire new floor.

you could use the known location of a receiver on the ground to calculate the location of a satellite, McClure asked, could you reverse the problem? Could you calculate the location of a receiver on the ground if you knew the exact orbit of the satellite?

If you wish to see firsthand the unpredictable power of an emergent platform, you need only look at what has happened to GPS over the past five years.

When Guier and Weiffenbach were asked to explain how they had hit upon their Sputnik revelation, they credited the intellectual habitat of the Applied Physics Lab more than their own particular talents:

The most generative platforms come in stacks, most conspicuously in the layered platform of the Web.

Culture, too, relies on stacked platforms of information. Kuhn’s paradigms of research are the scientific world’s equivalent of a software platform: a set of rules and conventions that govern the definition of terms, the collection of data, and the boundaries of inquiry for a particular field.

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

Often, new scientific fields form by propping themselves over multiple platforms.

Even the creative arts evolve via stacked platforms.

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.

The creative stack is deeper than genres, though. Genres are themselves built on top of more stable conventions and technologies.

The diversity of the Twitter platform is no accident. It derives from a deliberate strategy that Dorsey, Williams, and Stone embraced from the outset: they built an emergent platform first, and then they built Twitter.com.

Conventional software assumes that API users are second-class citizens who shouldn’t get full access to the software’s secret sauce for fear of losing competitive advantage. Twitter’s creators recognized that there was another kind of competitive advantage that came from complete openness: the advantage that comes from having the largest and most diverse ecosystem of software applications being built on your platform.

emergent platforms can dramatically reduce the costs of creation.

The wetland created by the beaver, like the thriving platform created by the Twitter founders, invites variation because it is an open platform where resources are shared as much as they are protected.