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natural selection also rewards innovation, life’s tendency to discover new ecological niches, new sources of energy.
Scrambling together two distinct sets of DNA with each generation made for a far more complicated reproductive strategy, but it paid immense dividends in the rate of innovation.
And the quickest path to innovation lies in making novel connections. This strategy of switching back and forth between asexual and sexual reproduction goes by the name “heterogamy,” and while it is unusual, many different organisms have adopted it.
When nature finds itself in need of new ideas, it strives to connect, not protect.
Serendipity needs unlikely collisions and discoveries, but it also needs something to anchor those discoveries.
But the qualitative change lies elsewhere: in finding documents that I’ve forgotten about altogether, finding documents that I didn’t know I was looking for. What makes the system truly powerful is the way that it fosters private serendipity.
the rise of the Web, its proponents argue, has led to a decline in serendipitous discovery.
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,
When critics complain about the decline of serendipity, they habitually point to two “old media” mechanisms that allegedly have no direct equivalent on the Web.
browsing the stacks in a library
The second analog-era mechanism that encourages serendipity involves the physical limitations of the print newspaper,
Filters reduce serendipity
What is native to the Web’s architecture are two key features that have been great supporters of serendipity: a global, distributed medium in which anyone can be a publisher, and a hypertext document structure in which it is trivial to jump from a newspaper article to an academic essay to an encyclopedia entry in a matter of seconds.
If the commonplace book tradition tells us that the best way to nurture hunches is to write everything down, the serendipity engine of the Web suggests a parallel directive: look everything up.
Protecting ideas from copycats and competitors also protects them from other ideas that might improve them, might transform them from hints and hunches to true innovations.
In collaboration with Creative Commons, Nike released its patents under a modified license permitting use in “non-competitive” fields.
The secret to organizational inspiration is to build information networks that allow hunches to persist and disperse and recombine. 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
By making the ideas public, and by ensuring that they remain stored in the database, these systems create an architecture for organizational serendipity. They give good ideas new ways to connect.
A shockingly large number of transformative ideas in the annals of science can be attributed to contaminated laboratory environments. Alexander Fleming famously discovered the medical virtues of penicillin when the mold accidentally infiltrated a culture of Staphylococcus he had left by an open window in his lab.
Error often creates a path that leads you out of your comfortable assumptions.
Being right keeps you in place. Being wrong forces you to explore.
“The error is needed to set off the truth, much as a dark background is required for exhibiting the brightness of a picture.”
They assumed the result was noise, not signal.
good ideas are more likely to emerge in environments that contain a certain amount of noise and error.
The best innovation labs are always a little contaminated.
Recent studies suggest that the mutation rate in human germ cells is roughly one in thirty million base pairs, which means each time parents pass their DNA on to a child, that genetic inheritance comes with roughly 150 mutations.
Innovative environments thrive on useful mistakes, and suffer when the demands of quality control overwhelm them.
Benjamin Franklin, who knew a few things about innovation himself, said it best: “Perhaps the history of the errors of mankind, all things considered, is more valuable and interesting than that of their discoveries. Truth is uniform and narrow; it constantly exists, and does not seem to require so much an active energy, as a passive aptitude of soul in order to encounter it. But error is endlessly diversified.”
Gutenberg’s printing press was a classic combinatorial innovation, more bricolage than breakthrough. Each of the key elements that made it such a transformative machine—the movable type, the ink, the paper, and the press itself—had been developed separately well before Gutenberg printed his first Bible.
An organism develops a trait optimized for a specific use, but then the trait gets hijacked for a completely different function.
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. Subcultures and eclectic businesses generate ideas, interests, and skills that inevitably diffuse through the society, influencing other groups.
Cities, then, are environments that are ripe for exaptation, because they cultivate specialized skills and interests, and they create a liquid network where information can leak out of those subcultures, and influence their neighbors in surprising ways. This is one explanation for superlinear scaling in urban creativity.
The eighteenth-century English coffeehouse fertilized countless Enlightenment-era innovations; everything from the science of electricity, to the insurance industry, to democracy itself.
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
The answer is that Apple’s development cycle looks more like a coffeehouse than an assembly line. The traditional way to build a product like the iPod is to follow a linear chain of expertise.
This model is so ubiquitous because it performs well in situations where efficiency is key, but it tends to have disastrous effects on creativity, because the original idea gets chipped away at each step in the chain.
The engineering team takes a look at the original design and says, “Well, we can’t really do that—but we can do 80 percent of what you want.” And then the manufacturing team says, “Sure, we can do some of that.” In the end, the original design has been watered down beyond recognition.
the Doppler effect describes the predictable way a waveform’s frequency changes when the source or the receiver is in motion.
Carrier applied for a patent for his “Apparatus for Treating Air” in September of 1904.
The business made Carrier a wealthy man, as air conditioning went from a curiosity to a luxury item to a middle-class necessity.
Carrier’s idea ultimately rearranged the social and political map of America.
Carrier’s story is the archetypal myth of modern innovation. A clever individual, working in a private research lab, driven by ambition and the promise of great riches, hits upon a brilliant idea in a sudden flash of insight and the world changes.
If ideas were fully liberated, then entrepreneurs wouldn’t be able to profit from their innovations, because their competitors would immediately adopt them. And so where innovation is concerned, we have deliberately built inefficient markets:
All of the patterns of innovation we have observed in the previous chapters—liquid networks, slow hunches, serendipity, noise, exaptation, emergent platforms—do best in open environments where ideas flow in unregulated channels.
There are good ideas, and then there are good ideas that make it easier to have other good ideas.
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.
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.
