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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.
If you plotted mass versus metabolism on a logarithmic grid, the result was a perfectly straight line that led from rats and pigeons all the way up to bulls and hippopotami.
metabolism scales to mass to the negative quarter power. The math is simple enough: you take the square root of 1,000, which is (approximately) 31, and then take the square root of 31, which is (again, approximately) 5.5. This means that a cow, which is roughly a thousand times heavier than a woodchuck, will, on average, live 5.5 times longer, and have a heart rate that is 5.5 times slower than the woodchuck’s.
Every datapoint that involved creativity and innovation—patents, R&D budgets, “supercreative” professions, inventors—also followed a quarter-power law,
A city that was ten times larger than its neighbor wasn’t ten times more innovative; it was seventeen times more innovative. A metropolis fifty times bigger than a town was 130 times more innovative.
This is what we call “superlinear scaling”:
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.
Call it the 10/10 rule: a decade to build the new platform, and a decade for it to find a mass audience.
The long-zoom approach lets us see that openness and connectivity may, in the end, be more valuable to innovation than purely competitive mechanisms.
we are often better served by connecting ideas than we are by protecting them.
You could effectively halve the mortality rate for premature babies simply by treating them like hatchlings in a zoo.
Modern incubators, supplemented with high-oxygen therapy and other advances, became standard equipment in all American hospitals after the end of World War II, triggering a spectacular 75 percent decline in infant mortality rates between 1950 and 1998.
NeoNurture. From the outside, it looked like a streamlined modern incubator, but its guts were automotive.
Good ideas are like the NeoNurture device. They are, inevitably, constrained by the parts and skills that surround them.
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.
What the adjacent possible tells us is that at any moment the world is capable of extraordinary change, but only certain changes can happen.
one way to think about the path of evolution is as a continual exploration of the adjacent possible.
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.
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 new idea is a network of cells exploring the adjacent possible of connections that they can make in your mind.
The second precondition is that the network be plastic, capable of adopting new configurations.
In a gas, chaos rules; new configurations are possible, but they are constantly being disrupted and torn apart by the volatile nature of the environment. In a solid, the opposite happens: the patterns have stability, but they are incapable of change. But a liquid network creates a more promising environment for the system to explore the adjacent possible. New configurations can emerge through random connections formed between molecules, but the system isn’t so wildly unstable that it instantly destroys its new creations.
high-density liquid networks make it easier for innovation to happen, but they also serve the essential function of storing those innovations.
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.
This is not the wisdom of the crowd, but the wisdom of someone in the crowd. It’s not that the network itself is smart; it’s that the individuals get smarter because they’re connected to the network.
people tend to condense the origin stories of their best ideas into tidy narratives, forgetting the messy, convoluted routes to inspiration that they actually followed.
most important ideas emerged during regular lab meetings, where a dozen or so researchers would gather and informally present and discuss their latest work.
The magic of Building 20, powerfully eulogized in Stewart Brand’s How Buildings Learn, lay in the balance the environment struck between order and chaos.
Flow is not the singular intensity of focusing “like a laser,” as we often say. And it is not the miraculous illumination of a sudden brainstorm. Rather, it is more the feeling of drifting along a stream, being carried in a clear direction, but still tossed in surprising ways by the eddies and whirls of moving water.
Building 99—like Building 20 before it—is a space that sees information spillover as a feature, not a flaw.
because those ideas were by definition successful ones, it’s tempting to attribute their success to intrinsic causes: the sheer brilliance of the idea itself, or the sheer brilliance of the mind that came up with it. But those intrinsic causes can easily overshadow the environmental role in the creation and spread of those ideas.
Hunches that don’t connect are doomed to stay hunches.
these slow hunches need so much time to develop, they are fragile creatures, easily lost to the more pressing needs of day-to-day issues.
part of the secret of hunch cultivation is simple: write everything down.
a long and fruitful tradition that peaked in Enlightenment-era Europe, particularly in England: the practice of maintaining a “commonplace” book.
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.”
Reading and writing were therefore inseparable activities. They belonged to a continuous effort to make sense of things, for the world was full of signs: you could read your way through it; and by keeping an account of your readings, you made a book of your own, one stamped with your personality.
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.
The Web came into being as an archetypal slow hunch: from a child’s exploration of a hundred-year-old encyclopedia, to a freelancer’s idle side project designed to help him keep track of his colleagues, to a deliberate attempt to build a new information platform that could connect computers across the planet.
He needed a work environment that carved out a space for slow hunches, cordoned off from all the immediate dictates of the day’s agenda. And he needed information networks that let those hunches travel to other minds, where they could be augmented and polished.
AdSense, Google’s platform that allows bloggers and Web publishers to run Google ads on their sites, was partially generated during 20-percent time.
Orkut, one of the largest social network sites in India and Brazil, originated in the Innovation Time Off of a Turkish Google engineer named Orkut Büyükkökten.
Marissa Mayer, Google’s vice president of Search Products and User Experience, claims that over 50 percent of Google’s new products derive from Innovation Time Off hunches.
StoryRank eventually blossomed into Google News, one of the most popular (and controversial) sources of news and commentary on the Web.
Google News launched in September of 2002, which means StoryRank went from a hunch in Krishna Bharat’s mind to a shipping product in one year.
The Russian scientist Dmitri Mendeleev created the periodic table of the elements after a dream suggested to him that the table could be ordered by atomic weight.
The work of dreams turns out to be a particularly chaotic, yet productive, way of exploring the adjacent possible.
When Thatcher then compared the brain-wave results with the children’s IQ scores, he found a direct correlation between the two data sets. Every extra millisecond spent in the chaotic mode added as much as twenty IQ points.
Thatcher’s study suggests a counterintuitive notion: the more disorganized your brain is, the smarter you are.
Asexual organisms reproduce on average twice as quickly as their sexual counterparts, in part because without a male/female distinction, every organism is capable of producing offspring directly.
