Rosa’s Reviews > Where Good Ideas Come From > Status Update

Book effectively ends at 62%: Last 38% of the Kindle version is given to notes, acknowledgements, a bibliography and the [unlinked] index. However Johnson takes his time with his concluding remarks, and I was very satisfied; best to ignore the progress relevance altogether.

"To my mind, the great question for our time is whether large organizations—public and private, governments and corporations alike—can better harness the innovation turbine of fourth-quadrant systems... it is the public sector that I find more interesting, because governments and other non-market institutions have long suffered from the innovation malaise of top-heavy bureaucracies." Agree.

1. 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. 2. That's the unpredictable power of exaptations. Chance favors the connected mind. 3. Modern scientific paradigms are rarely overthrown. Instead, they are built upon. They create a platform.

Being right keeps you in place. Being wrong forces you to explore... Read more at location 1571

Johnson's talent at describing scientific condition (e.g. the big deal about "primordial soup" as liquid network) make me believe I had very sub-standard science teachers in school... my lessons weren't anything like this.