Where Good Ideas Come From Quotes

“When you think about ideas in their native state of neural networks, two key preconditions become clear. First, the sheer size of the network: you can’t have an epiphany with only three neurons firing. The network needs to be densely populated.”
― Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From

“shaking ourselves free of this common misconception: an idea is not a single thing. It is more like a swarm.”
― Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From

“A good idea is a network. A specific constellation of neurons—thousands of them—fire in sync with each other for the first time in your brain, and an idea pops into your consciousness. A new idea is a network of cells exploring the adjacent possible of connections that they can make in your mind.”
― Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From

“innovative environments are better at helping their inhabitants explore the adjacent possible, because they expose a wide and diverse sample of spare parts—mechanical or conceptual—and they encourage novel ways of recombining those parts. Environments that block or limit those new combinations—by punishing experimentation, by obscuring certain branches of possibility, by making the current state so satisfying that no one bothers to explore the edges—will, on average, generate and circulate fewer innovations than environments that encourage exploration.”
― Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From

“The trick is to figure out ways to explore the edges of possibility that surround you.”
― Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From

“All of us live inside our own private versions of the adjacent possible. In our work lives, in our creative pursuits, in the organizations that employ us, in the communities we inhabit—in all these different environments, we are surrounded by potential new configurations, new ways of breaking out of our standard routines.”
― Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From

“Had Hurley, Chen, and Karim tried to execute the exact same idea for YouTube ten years earlier, in 1995, it would have been a spectacular flop, because a site for sharing video was not within the adjacent possible of the early Web.”
― Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From

“Why did the Analytical Engine prove to be such a short-term dead end, given the brilliance of Babbage’s ideas? The fancy way to say it is that his ideas had escaped the bounds of the adjacent possible. But it is perhaps better put in more prosaic terms: Babbage simply didn’t have the right spare parts. Even if Babbage had built a machine to his specs, it is unclear whether it would have worked, because Babbage was effectively sketching out a machine for the electronic age during the middle of the steam-powered mechanical revolution.”
― Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From

“The adjacent possible is as much about limits as it is about openings. At every moment in the timeline of an expanding biosphere, there are doors that cannot be unlocked yet.”
― Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From

“Good ideas are not conjured out of thin air; they are built out of a collection of existing parts, the composition of which expands (and, occasionally, contracts) over time. Some of those parts are conceptual: ways of solving problems, or new definitions of what constitutes a problem in the first place. Some of them are, literally, mechanical parts.”
― Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From

“Ogburn and Thomas found 148 instances of independent innovation, most them occurring within the same decade.”
― Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From

“You can see the fingerprints of the adjacent possible in one of the most remarkable patterns in all of intellectual history, what scholars now call “the multiple”: A brilliant idea occurs to a scientist or inventor somewhere in the world, and he goes public with his remarkable finding, only to discover that three other minds had independently come up with the same idea in the past year.”
― Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From

“The Web has explored the adjacent possible of its medium far faster than any other communications technology in history.”
― Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From

“The history of life and human culture, then, can be told as the story of a gradual but relentless probing of the adjacent possible, each new innovation opening up new paths to explore. But some systems are more adept than others at exploring those possibility spaces. The mystery of Darwin’s paradox that we began with ultimately revolves around the question of why a coral reef ecosystem should be so adventurous in its exploration of the adjacent possible—so many different life forms sharing such a small space—while the surrounding waters of the ocean lack that same marvelous diversity.”
― Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From

“The same pattern appears again and again throughout the evolution of life. Indeed, one way to think about the path of evolution is as a continual exploration of the adjacent possible.”
― Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From

“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. Yet is it not an infinite space, or a totally open playing field. The number of potential first-order reactions is vast, but it is a finite number, and it excludes most of the forms that now populate the biosphere. What the adjacent possible tells us is that at any moment the world is capable of extraordinary change, but only certain changes can happen.”
― Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From

“Nature’s innovations, too, rely on spare parts. Evolution advances by taking available resources and cobbling them together to create new uses.”
― Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From

“Good ideas are like the NeoNurture device. They are, inevitably, constrained by the parts and skills that surround them.”
― Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From

“The towns might have lacked air conditioning and laptops and cable television, but they managed to keep their Toyota 4Runners on the road. So Rosen approached Prestero with an idea: What if you made an incubator out of automobile parts? Three years after Rosen suggested the idea, the Design that Matters team introduced a prototype device called the NeoNurture. From the outside, it looked like a streamlined modern incubator, but its guts were automotive.”
― Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From

“Prestero had a vested interest in those broken incubators, because the organization he founded, Design that Matters, had been working for several years on a new scheme for a more reliable, and less expensive, incubator, one that recognized complex medical technology was likely to have a very different tenure in a developing world context than it would in an American or European hospital. Designing an incubator for a developing country wasn’t just a matter of creating something that worked; it was also a matter of designing something that would break in a non-catastrophic way.”
― Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From

“some studies suggest that as much as 95 percent of medical technology donated to developing countries breaks within the first five years of use.”
― Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From

“Good ideas may not want to be free, but they do want to connect, fuse, recombine.”
― Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From

“The poet and the engineer (and the coral reef) may seem a million miles apart in their particular forms of expertise, but when they bring good ideas into the world, similar patterns of development and collaboration shape that process.”
― Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From

“The academic literature on innovation and creativity is rich with subtle distinctions between innovations and inventions, between different modes of creativity: artistic, scientific, technological. I have deliberately chosen the broadest possible phrasing—good ideas—to suggest the cross-disciplinary vantage point I am trying to occupy. The good ideas in this survey range from software platforms to musical genres to scientific paradigms to new models for government. My premise is that there is as much value to be found in seeking the common properties across all these varied forms of innovation and creativity as there is value to be found in documenting the differences between them.”
― Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From

“Every economics textbook will tell you that competition between rival firms leads to innovation in their products and services. But when you look at innovation from the long-zoom perspective, competition turns out to be less central to the history of good ideas than we generally think. Analyzing innovation on the scale of individuals and organizations—as the standard textbooks do—distorts our view. It creates a picture of innovation that overstates the role of proprietary research and “survival of the fittest” competition. The long-zoom approach lets us see that openness and connectivity may, in the end, be more valuable to innovation than purely competitive mechanisms. Those patterns of innovation deserve recognition—in part because it’s intrinsically important to understand why good ideas emerge historically, and in part because by embracing these patterns we can build environments that do a better job of nurturing good ideas, whether those environments are schools, governments, software platforms, poetry seminars, or social movements. We can think more creatively if we open our minds to the many connected environments that make creativity possible.”
― Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From

“When life gets creative, it has a tendency to gravitate toward certain recurring patterns, whether those patterns are emergent and self-organizing, or whether they are deliberately crafted by human agents.”
― Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From

“these patterns of innovation and creativity are fractal: they reappear in recognizable form as you zoom in and out, from molecule to neuron to pixel to sidewalk.”
― Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From

“If we want to understand where good ideas come from, we have to put them in context.”
― Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From

“This is a book about the space of innovation. Some environments squelch new ideas; some environments seem to breed them effortlessly. The city and the Web have been such engines of innovation because, for complicated historical reasons, they are both environments that are powerfully suited for the creation, diffusion, and adoption of good ideas.”
― Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From

“There are many ways to measure innovation, but perhaps the most elemental yardstick, at least where technology is concerned, revolves around the job that the technology in question lets you do. All other things being equal, a breakthrough that lets you execute two jobs that were impossible before is twice as innovative as a breakthrough that lets you do only one new thing. By that measure, YouTube was significantly more innovative than HDTV, despite the fact that HDTV was a more complicated technical problem. YouTube let you publish, share, rate, discuss, and watch video more efficiently than ever before. HDTV let you watch more pixels than ever before. But even with all those extra layers of innovation, YouTube went from idea to mass adoption in less than two years. Something about the Web environment had enabled Hurley, Chen, and Karim to unleash a good idea on the world with astonishing speed. They took the 10/ 10 rule and made it 1/ 1.”
― Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From