Where Good Ideas Come From Quotes

“His radical breakthrough relied, instead, on the ubiquity of the screw press in Rhineland wine-making culture, and on his ability to reach out beyond his specific field of expertise and concoct new uses for an older technology. He took a machine designed to get people drunk and turned it into an engine for mass communication.”
― Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From

“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.”
― Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From

“When those parts became available, the discovery of oxygen entered the realm of the adjacent possible.”
― Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From

“The first electrical battery was invented separately by Dean Von Kleist and Cuneus of Leyden in 1745 and 1746. Joseph Priestley and Carl Wilhelm Scheele independently isolated oxygen between 1772 and 1774.”
― Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From

“Sony inaugurated research into the first consumer videocassette recorder in 1969, but didn’t ship its first Betamax for another seven years, and VCRs didn’t become a household necessity until the mid-eighties.”
― Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From

“A metropolis fifty times bigger than a town was 130 times more innovative.”
― Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From

“A city that was ten times larger than its neighbor wasn’t ten times more innovative; it was seventeen times more innovative.”
― Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From

“Universities have a reputation for ivory-tower isolation from the real world, but it is an undeniable fact that most of the paradigmatic ideas in science and technology that arose during the past century have roots in academic research.”
― Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From

“What is the right balance? It’s certainly conceivable that the promise of hitting a financial jackpot is so overwhelming that it more than makes up for the inefficiencies introduced by intellectual property law and closed R&D labs. That has generally been the guiding assumption for most modern discussions of innovation’s roots, an assumption largely based on the free market’s track record for innovation during that period. Because capitalist economies proved to be more innovative than socialist and communist economies, the story went, the deliberate inefficiencies of the market-based approach must have benefits that exceed their costs. But, as we have seen, this is a false comparison. The test is not how the market fares against command economies. The real test is how it fares against the fourth quadrant. As the private corporation evolved over the past two centuries, a mirror image of it grew in parallel in the public sector: the modern research university. Most academic research today is fourth-quadrant in its approach: new ideas are published with the deliberate goal of allowing other participants to refine and build upon them, with no restrictions on their circulation beyond proper acknowledgment of their origin. It is not pure anarchy, to be sure. You can’t simply steal a colleague’s idea without proper citation, but there is a fundamental difference between suing for patent infringement and asking for a footnote.”
― Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From

“That deliberate inefficiency doesn’t exist in the fourth quadrant. No, these non-market, decentralized environments do not have immense paydays to motivate their participants. But their openness creates other, powerful opportunities for good ideas to flourish. 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. In more controlled environments, where the natural movement of ideas is tightly restrained, they suffocate.”
― Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From

“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: 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.”
― Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From

“Why have so many good ideas flourished in the fourth quadrant, despite the lack of economic incentives? One answer is that economic incentives have a much more complicated relationship to the development and adoption of good ideas than we usually imagine. The promise of an immense payday encourages people to come up with useful innovations, but at the same time it forces people to protect those innovations.”
― Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From

“Against all odds, the first quadrant turns out to be the least populated on the grid. Willis Carrier is an outlier after all. In the private sector, the proprietary breakthrough achieved in a closed lab turns out to be a rarity. For every Alfred Nobel, inventing dynamite in secret in the suburbs of Stockholm, there are a half dozen collective inventions like the vacuum tube or the television, whose existence depended upon multiple firms driven by the profit motive who managed to create a significant new product via decentralized networking. Folklore calls Edison the inventor of the lightbulb, but in truth the lightbulb came into being through a complex network of interaction between Edison and his rivals, each contributing key pieces to the puzzle along the way. Collective invention is not some socialist fantasy; entrepreneurs like Edison and de Forest were very much motivated by the possibility of financial rewards, and they tried to patent as much as they could. But the utility of building on other people’s ideas often outweighed the exclusivity of building something entirely from scratch.”
― Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From

“A vertical movement toward market incentives is noticeable, nonetheless. As industrial capitalism arises in England in the eighteenth century, new economic structures raise the stakes for commercial ventures: tantalizing rewards lure innovators into private enterprise, and the codification of English patent laws in the early 1700s gives some reassurance that good ideas will not be stolen with impunity. Despite this new protection, most commercial innovation during this period takes a collaborative form, with many individuals and firms contributing crucial tweaks and refinements to the product. The history books like to condense these slower, evolutionary processes into eureka moments dominated by a single inventor, but most of the key technologies that powered the Industrial Revolution were instances of what scholars call “collective invention.” Textbooks casually refer to James Watt as the inventor of the steam engine, but in truth Watt was one of dozens of innovators who refined the device over the course of the eighteenth century.”
― Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From

“Scanning the next two centuries, we see that the pattern changes dramatically (see page 229). Solo, amateur innovation (quadrant three) surrenders much of its lead to the rising power of networks and commerce (quadrant four). The most dramatic change lies along the horizontal axis, in a mass migration from individual breakthroughs (on the left) to the creative insights of the group (on the right). Less than 10 percent of innovation during the Renaissance is networked; two centuries later, a majority of breakthrough ideas emerge in collaborative environments. Multiple developments precipitate this shift, starting with Gutenberg’s press, which begins to have a material impact on secular research a century and a half after the first Bible hits the stands, as scientific ideas are stored and shared in the form of books and pamphlets. Postal systems, so central to Enlightenment science, flower across Europe; population densities increase in the urban centers; coffeehouses and formal institutions like the Royal Society create new hubs for intellectual collaboration.”
― Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From

“This is the shape that Renaissance innovation takes, seen from a great (conceptual) distance. Most innovation clusters in the third quadrant: non-market individuals. A handful of outliers are scattered fairly evenly across the other three quadrants. This is the pattern that forms when information networks are slow and unreliable, and entrepreneurial economic conventions are poorly developed. It’s too hard to share ideas when the printing press and the postal system are still novelties, and there’s not enough incentive to commercialize those ideas without a robust marketplace of buyers and investors. And so the era is dominated by solo artists: amateur investigators, usually well-to-do, working on their own private obsessions. Not surprisingly, this period marks the birth of the modern notion of the inventive genius, the rogue visionary who somehow sees beyond the horizon that limits his contemporaries—da Vinci, Copernicus, Galileo. Some of those solo artists (Galileo most famously) worked outside of broader groups because their research posed a significant security threat to the established powers of the day. The few innovations that did emerge out of networks—the portable, spring-loaded watches that first appeared in Nuremberg in 1480, the double-entry bookkeeping system developed by Italian merchants—have their geographic origins in cities, where information networks were more robust. First-quadrant solo entrepreneurs, crafting their products in secret to ensure their eventual payday, turn out to be practically nonexistent. Gutenberg was the exception, not the rule.”
― Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From

“Is Willis Carrier an anomaly or not? The question has real political and social stakes, because the doxa of market capitalism as an unparalleled innovation engine has long leaned on stories like Willis Carrier’s miraculous cooling device as a cornerstone of its faith.6 In many respects, these beliefs made sense, because the implicit alternatives were the planned economies of socialism and communism. State-run economies were fundamentally hierarchies, not networks. They consolidated decision-making power in a top-down command system, which meant that new ideas had to be approved by the authorities before they could begin to spread through the society. Markets, by contrast, allowed good ideas to erupt anywhere in the system. In modern tech-speak, markets allowed innovation to flourish at the edges of the network. Planned economies were more like the old mainframe computer systems that predated the Internet, where every participant had to get authorization from a central machine to do new work. When Friedrich von Hayek launched his influential argument in the 1940s about the importance of price signals in market economies, he was observing a related phenomenon: the decentralized pricing mechanism of the marketplace allows an entrepreneur to gauge the relative value of his or her innovation. If you come up with an interesting new contraption, you don’t need to persuade a government commission of its value. You just need to get someone to buy it. Entire institutions and legal frameworks—not to mention a vast tower of conventional wisdom—have been built around the Carrier model of innovation. But what if he’s the exception and not the rule?”
― Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From

“When Guier, Weiffenbach, and McClure were designing their system to help American submarines launch Polaris missiles against the Soviet Union, it never occurred to them that someday someone would use their platform to rave about a bowl of potato and leek soup to nearby strangers. Stacked platforms are like that: you think you’re fighting the Cold War, and it turns out you’re actually helping people figure out where to have lunch.”
― Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From

“The story here is not the old chestnut of living in a connected age where information flows more quickly than ever before. The information is not simply flowing in this system; it’s being recycled and put to new uses, transformed by a diverse network of other species in the ecosystem, each with its own distinct function. You write a tweet about what you had for lunch—the original sin of Twitter banality—and within minutes that information is being harnessed to assist a staggering number of different tasks: neighbors forging new personal connections, foodies seeking a delicious cup of potato and leek soup, restaurant owners getting unvarnished feedback from their patrons, Google organizing all the world’s information, newspapers improving their neighborhood coverage at lower cost, and local businesses seeking the attention of the people in their immediate community.”
― Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From

“The Web is not simply an ecosystem; it is a specific type of ecosystem. It started as a desert, and it has been steadily transforming into a coral reef.”
― Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From

“Artificial reefs create significant breeding grounds for a diverse group of fish; the Delaware reefs have seen a 400 percent increase in biomass since the first cars were sunk. (Artificial reefs also have the secondary effect of preventing beach erosion.) No longer needed for mass transportation, the abandoned subway cars have taken on a new occupation in their retirement years. They are now ecosystem engineers.”
― Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From

“Part of that magic is economic: emergent platforms can dramatically reduce the costs of creation.”
― Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From

“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. Call it cooperative advantage. The burden of coming up with good ideas for the product is no longer shouldered exclusively by the company itself. On an open platform, good ideas can come from anywhere.”
― Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From

“Conventionally, a developer will create a piece of software, and once it’s finished, expose a small part of its functionality to outside developers via the API. 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.”
― Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From

“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. An open platform in software is often called an API, which stands for application programming interface. An API is a kind of lingua franca that software applications can use reliably to communicate with each other, a set of standardized rules and definitions that allow programmers to build new tools on top of another platform, or to weave together information from multiple platforms. When Web users make geographic mashups using Google Maps, they write programs that communicate with Google’s geographic data using their mapping API.”
― Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From

“when Hurley, Chen, and Karim sat down to create YouTube, they built the service by stitching together elements from three different platforms: the Web itself, of course, but also Adobe’s Flash platform, which handled all the video playback, and the programming language Javascript, which allowed end users to embed video clips on their own sites. Their ability to build on top of these existing platforms explains why three guys could build YouTube in six months, while an army of expert committees and electronics companies took twenty years to make HDTV a reality.”
― Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From

“Most hotbeds of innovation have similar physical spaces associated with them: the Homebrew Computing Club in Silicon Valley; Freud’s Wednesday salon at 19 Berggasse; the eighteenth-century English coffeehouse. All these spaces were, in their own smaller-scale fashion, emergent platforms.”
― Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From

“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. The engineers that built the system—starting with Guier and Weiffenbach—created an entire ecosystem of unexpected utility. Frank McClure recognized that you could harness Guier and Weiffenbach’s original insight to track nuclear submarines, but he had no inkling that fifty years later the same system would help teenagers to play elaborate games in urban centers, or climbers to explore treacherous mountain ranges, or photographers to upload their photos to Flickr maps.”
― Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From

“that is the unpredictable power of exaptations. Chance favors the connected mind.”
― Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From

“Apple’s approach, by contrast, is messier and more chaotic at the beginning, but it avoids this chronic problem of good ideas being hollowed out as they progress through the development chain. Apple calls it concurrent or parallel production. All the groups—design, manufacturing, engineering, sales—meet continuously through the product-development cycle, brainstorming, trading ideas and solutions, strategizing over the most pressing issues, and generally keeping the conversation open to a diverse group of perspectives. The process is noisy and involves far more open-ended and contentious meetings than traditional production cycles—and far more dialogue between people versed in different disciplines, with all the translation difficulties that creates. But the results speak for themselves.”
― Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From