# Where Good Ideas Come From - Steven Johnson Synced: [[2023_11_30]] 6:03 AM Last Highlighted: [[2023_11_30]]  ## Highlights [[2023_11_10]] > Call it the 10/10 rule: a decade to build the new platform, and a decade for it to find a mass audience. [[2023_11_11]] > The strange and beautiful truth about the adjacent possible is that its boundaries grow as you explore those boundaries. [[2023_11_11]] > When our ancestors evolved opposable thumbs, they opened up a whole new cultural branch of the adjacent possible: the creation and use of finely crafted tools and weapons. [[2023_11_11]] > 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. We are, each of us, surrounded by the conceptual equivalent of those Toyota spare parts, all waiting to be recombined into something magical, something new. It need not be the epic advances of biological diversity, or the invention of programmable computing. Unlocking a new door can lead to a world-changing scientific breakthrough, but it can also lead to a more effective strategy for teaching second-graders, or a novel marketing idea for the vacuum cleaner your company’s about to release. 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. [[2023_11_11]] > What kind of environment creates good ideas? The simplest way to answer it is this: 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. [[2023_11_11]] > This, then, is where the next six patterns of innovation will take us, because they all involve, in one way or another, tactics for assembling a more eclectic collection of building block ideas, spare parts that can be reassembled into useful new configurations. 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. [[2023_11_11]] > 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. This is true whether the idea in question is a new way to solve a complex physics problem, or a closing line for a novel, or a feature for a software application. If we’re going to try to explain the mystery of where ideas come from, we’ll have to start by shaking ourselves free of this common misconception: an idea is not a single thing. It is more like a swarm. [[The Formula]] a good idea is not found in isolation it is the connection of networks of thought. [[2023_11_11]] > The 100 billion neurons in your brain form another kind of liquid network: densely interconnected, constantly exploring new patterns, but also capable of preserving useful structures for long periods of time. While your brain is capable of storing ideas. [[Your brain is for having ideas not storing them]] [[2023_11_11]] > In 1964, Arthur Koestler published his epic account of innovation’s roots, The Act of Creation. The book was an attempt to explain how breakthrough ideas in science and art come about. Hm sounds like [[The Creative Act]] [[2023_11_11]] > Sustaining the slow hunch is less a matter of perspiration than of cultivation. You give the hunch enough nourishment to keep it growing, and plant it in fertile soil, where its roots can make new connections. And then you give it time to bloom. [[2023_11_11]] > Darwin’s notebooks lie at the tail end of a long and fruitful tradition that peaked in Enlightenment-era Europe, particularly in England: the practice of maintaining a “commonplace” book. Scholars, amateur scientists, aspiring men of letters—just about anyone with intellectual ambition in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was likely to keep a commonplace book. [[Second Brain]] [[2023_11_11]] > The tradition of the commonplace book contains a central tension between order and chaos, between the desire for methodical arrangement, and the desire for surprising new links of association. [[Knowledge is Compression]] [[2023_11_11]] > Unlike modern readers, who follow the flow of a narrative from beginning to end, early modern Englishmen read in fits and starts and jumped from book to book. They broke texts into fragments and assembled them into new patterns by transcribing them in different sections of their notebooks. Then they reread the copies and rearranged the patterns while adding more excerpts. 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. [[Writing is thinking]] [[2023_11_11]] > Each rereading of the commonplace book becomes a new kind of revelation. You see the evolutionary paths of all your past hunches: the ones that turned out to be red herrings; the ones that turned out to be too obvious to write; even the ones that turned into entire books. But each encounter holds the promise that some long-forgotten hunch will connect in a new way with some emerging obsession. [[The Slow Hunch]] [[PKM]] [[Second Brain]] [[2023_11_11]] > There is nothing mystical about the role of dreams in scientific discovery. While dream activity remains a fertile domain for research, we know that during REM sleep acetylcholine-releasing cells in the brain stem fire indiscriminately, sending surges of electricity billowing out across the brain. Memories and associations are triggered in a chaotic, semirandom fashion, creating the hallucinatory quality of dreams. Most of those new neuronal connections are meaningless, but every now and then the dreaming brain stumbles across a valuable link that has escaped waking consciousness. In this sense, Freud had it backward with his notion of dreamwork: the dream is not somehow unveiling a repressed truth. Instead, it is exploring, trying to find new truths by experimenting with novel combinations of neurons. if true, through chaos we find order by default. We explore our archives in search of reltions [[2023_11_11]] > In 2007, Robert Thatcher, a brain scientist at the University of South Florida, decided to study the vacillation between phase-lock and noise in the brains of dozens of children. While Thatcher found that the noise periods lasted, on average, for 55 milliseconds, he also detected statistically significant variation among the children. Some brains had a tendency to remain longer in phase-lock, others had noise intervals that regularly approached 60 milliseconds. 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. Longer spells in phase-lock deducted IQ points, though not as dramatically. [[Research]] If true, what is happening in those 55ms? [[2023_11_12]] > I use DEVONthink as an improvisational tool as well. I write a paragraph about something—let’s say it’s about the human brain’s remarkable facility for interpreting facial expressions. I then plug that paragraph into the software, and ask DEVONthink to find other passages in my archive that are similar. Instantly, a list of quotes appears on my screen: some delving into the neural architecture that triggers facial expressions, others exploring the evolutionary history of the smile, others dealing with the expressiveness of our near-relatives, the chimpanzees. Invariably, one or two of these triggers a new association in my head—perhaps I’ve forgotten about the chimpanzee connection—and so I select that quote, and ask the software to find a new batch of passages similar to it. Semantic Search but 1st and 2nd order. Like NX Graph search but semantic across your knowledgebase [[2023_11_12]] > The premise that innovation prospers when ideas can serendipitously connect and recombine with other ideas, when hunches can stumble across other hunches that successfully fill in their blanks, may seem like an obvious truth, but the strange fact is that a great deal of the past two centuries of legal and folk wisdom about innovation has pursued the exact opposite argument, building walls between ideas, keeping them from the kind of random, serendipitous connections that exist in dreams and in the organic compounds of life. Ironically, those walls have been erected with the explicit aim of encouraging innovation. They go by many names: patents, digital rights management, intellectual property, trade secrets, proprietary technology. But they share a founding assumption: that in the long run, innovation will increase if you put restrictions on the spread of new ideas, because those restrictions will allow the creators to collect large financial rewards from their inventions. And those rewards will then attract other innovators to follow in their path.4 IP slows down innovation it does not protect it [[2023_11_12]] > In early 2010, Nike announced a new Web-based marketplace it called the GreenXchange, where it publicly released more than 400 of its patents that involve environmentally friendly materials or technologies. The marketplace was a kind of hybrid of commercial self-interest and civic good. By making its good ideas public, Nike made it possible for outside firms to improve on those innovations, creating new value that Nike itself might ultimately be able to put to use in its own products. In a sense, Nike was widening the network of minds who were actively thinking about how to make its ideas more useful, without putting anyone else on its payroll. But Nike’s organizational values also include a commitment to environmental sustainability, and the company recognized that many of its eco-friendly patents might be useful in different contexts. Nike is a big corporation, with many products in many categories, but there are limits to its reach. Some of its innovations might well turn out to be advantageous to industries or markets where it has no competitive involvement whatsoever. By keeping its eco-friendly ideas behind a veil of secrecy, Nike was holding back—without any real commercial justification—ideas that might, in another context, contribute to a sustainable future. In collaboration with Creative Commons, Nike released its patents under a modified license permitting use in “non-competitive” fields. (They also created a standardized, pre-negotiated contract for the patents, thereby reducing the transaction costs of haggling over each patent license individually.) Sharing IP can be a duty [[2023_11_12]] > Salesforce.com maintains a popular Idea Exchange where its customers can suggest new features for the company’s software products. The Idea Exchange doesn’t just allow interesting hunches to circulate and connect. It also tracks their maturation into shipping code: the front door of the Exchange includes prominent links to submitted ideas currently being considered for inclusion in future releases, as well as ideas that were successfully integrated into past releases. Too often, real-world suggestion boxes feel like a black hole; you drop your idea in the slot, and never hear about it again. In a public forum like Idea Exchange, not only do you get to see and improve other people’s suggestions, but you get tangible evidence that your ideas can make a difference. > These kinds of information networks can do a masterful job of tapping both individual and collective intelligence: the individual employee has a provocative and useful hunch, and the group helps complete the hunch by connecting it to other ideas that have circulated through the system, and helps separate out that hunch from the thousands of other less useful ones by voting it to the top of the charts. 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. Submitting even partial ideas to a publc firum allows for building on a slow hunch [[2023_11_11]] > While the creative walk can produce new serendipitous combinations of existing ideas in our heads, we can also cultivate serendipity in the way that we absorb new ideas from the outside world. Reading remains an unsurpassed vehicle for the transmission of interesting new ideas and perspectives. [[2023_11_11]] > Most of us don’t have the luxury of taking deep dive reading sabbaticals, of course, and reading a few thousand pages is not everyone’s idea of a fun vacation. But there’s no reason why organizations couldn’t recognize the value of a reading sabbatical, the way many organizations encourage their employees to take time off for learning new skills. If Google can give its engineers one day a week to work on anything they want, surely other organizations can figure out a way to give their employees dedicated time to immerse themselves in a network of new ideas. [[2023_11_12]] > good ideas are more likely to emerge in environments that contain a certain amount of noise and error. You would think that innovation would be more strongly correlated with the values of accuracy, clarity, and focus. A good idea has to be correct on some basic level, and we value good ideas because they tend to have a high signal-to-noise ratio. But that doesn’t mean you want to cultivate those ideas in noise-free environments, because noise-free environments end up being too sterile and predictable in their output. The best innovation labs are always a little contaminated [[2023_11_15]] > Big organizations like to follow perfectionist regimes like Six Sigma and Total Quality Management, entire systems devoted to eliminating error from the conference room or the assembly line, but it’s no accident that one of the mantras of the Web startup world is fail faster. It’s not that mistakes are the goal—they’re still mistakes, after all, which is why you want to get through them quickly. But those mistakes are an inevitable step on the path to true innovation. [[2023_11_23]] > Snow couldn’t have anticipated that his mechanical tinkering with chloroform inhalers would prove useful in ridding the modern world of a deadly bacterium, but that is the unpredictable power of exaptations. Chance favors the connected mind. [[T Shaped Skills]] [[Range]] [[The Formula]] the more things yiu sample across the more likely you are to come across a pattern that others have not come across before [[2023_11_15]] > The traditional way to build a product like the iPod is to follow a linear chain of expertise. The designers come up with a basic look and feature set and then pass it on to the engineers, who figure out how to actually make it work. And then it gets passed along to the manufacturing folks, who figure out how to build it in large numbers—after which it gets sent to the marketing and sales people, who figure out how to persuade people to buy it. 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. > 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. [[2023_11_24]] > Jacobs’s point was that the frenetic energy of a large city, the urban version of creative destruction, creates a natural supply of older, less-desirable environments that can be imaginatively reoccupied by the small or the eccentric, the subcultures that Fischer found so essential to urban life. Artists, poets, and entrepreneurs are the vibrant fish swimming among the coral of the Keeling Islands: they find it easier to live in an exoskeleton that has long since been abandoned by its original host. As Jacobs observed: > As for really new ideas of any kind—no matter how ultimately profitable or otherwise successful some of them might prove to be—there is no leeway for such chancy trial, error and experimentation in the high-overhead economy of new construction. Old ideas can sometimes use new buildings. New ideas must use old buildings. [[2023_11_30]] > A few weeks later, he was standing on the Rangiroa atoll in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, measuring the speed with which the corals built their skeletons, and his mind flashed back to the osteoporosis article. “If you could somehow capture these skeleton growth processes,” he thought, “you could really help all those old ladies with broken hips.” Two year later, he started his first company, which mimicked the coral’s growth mechanism to create bone cement to repair fractures. Today, the cements that Constantz created are employed in most orthopedic operating rooms throughout the United States and Europe [[2023_11_30]] > Nature has long built its platforms by recycling the available resources, including the waste generated by other organisms. Two things we have in abundance on this planet right now are pollution and seawater. Why not try to build a city out of them? [[2023_11_30]] > In a funny way, the real benefit of stacked platforms lies in the knowledge you no longer need to have. You don’t need to know how to send signals to satellites or parse geo-data to send that tweet circulating through the Web’s ecosystem. Miles Davis didn’t have to build a valved trumpet or invent the D Dorian mode to record Kind of Blue. The songbird sitting in an abandoned woodpecker’s nest doesn’t need to know how to drill a hole into the side of a poplar, or how to fell a hundred-foot tree. That is the generative power of open platforms. The songbird doesn’t carry the cost of drilling and felling because the knowledge of how to do those things was openly supplied by other species in the chain. She just needs to know how to tweet [[2023_11_30]] > 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. [[2023_11_30]] > What happens when you take the distant approaching to reading novels is that you’re able to see patterns that simply aren’t visible on the scale of paragraphs and pages, or even entire books. You could read a dozen “silver fork” novels and bildungsromans and yet miss the most striking fact revealed by Moretti’s chart: that the diversity of forms is strikingly balanced by their uncannily similar life spans, which Moretti attributes to underlying generational turnover. Every twenty-five to thirty years a new batch of genres becomes dominant, as a new generation of readers seeks out new literary conventions. If you’re trying to understand the meaning of an individual work, you have to read closely. But if you’re interested in the overall behavior of the literary system—its own patterns of innovation—sometimes you have to read from a long way off. Distabt Reading is classifying to understand trends. Close Reading is to understand content. [[2023_11_30]] > When you view the history of innovation from a distance, what you lose in detail you gain in perspective. Classifying two hundred good ideas into four broad quadrants certainly makes it harder to learn anything specific about each individual innovation. But it does allow us to answer the question we began with: What kind of environments make innovation possible in the first place? [[2023_11_30]] > 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 [[2023_11_30]] > 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. [[2023_11_30]] > 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 Copyright does not make for a good soil to grow ideas from precisely because of what it is trying to protect. [[2023_11_30]] > 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. A slow hunch can’t readily find its way to another hunch that might complete it if there’s a tariff to be paid every time it tries to make a new serendipitous connection; exaptations can’t readily occur across disciplinary lines if there are sentries guarding those borders. In open environments, however, those patterns of innovation can easily take hold and multiply. [[2023_11_30]] > 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. This is why [[AI]] has been able to move forward so quickly. Freedom of ideas. [[2023_11_30]] > 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. This is obviously true for the “pure” sciences like theoretical physics, but it is also true for lines of research that on their surface seem to have more straightforwardly commercial applications. [[2023_11_30]] > The connectedness of modern life means that we face the opposite problem: it is much harder to stop information from spilling over than it is to get it into circulation. The consequence of this is that private-sector firms who are intent on protecting their intellectual assets have to invest time and money in building barricades of artificial scarcity. [[2023_11_30]] > None of this is meant to imply that the marketplace is the enemy of innovation, or that competition between rival firms doesn’t often lead to useful new products. (The second quadrant, after all, bustles with dozens of brilliant ideas that changed our lives for the better.) And top-heavy bureaucracies remain innovation sinkholes. But, fortunately for us, the choice is not between decentralized markets and command-and-control states. Much of the history of intellectual achievement over these past centuries has lived in a less formal space between those two regimes: in the grad seminar and the coffeehouse and the hobbyist’s home lab and the digital bulletin board. The fourth quadrant should be a reminder that more than one formula exists for innovation. The wonders of modern life did not emerge exclusively from the proprietary clash between private firms. They also emerged from open networks [[The Formula]] [[2023_11_30]] > Ideas, Jefferson argues, have an almost gravitational attraction toward the fourth quadrant. The natural state of ideas is flow and spillover and connection. It is society that keeps them in chains. [[2023_11_30]] > As Lawrence Lessig has so persuasively argued over the years, there is nothing “natural” about the artificial scarcity of intellectual property law. Those laws are deliberate interventions crafted by human intelligence and are enforced almost entirely by non-market powers. Jefferson’s point, in his letter to McPherson, is that if you really want to get into a debate about which system is more “natural,” then the free flow of ideas is always going to trump the artificial scarcity of patents. Ideas are intrinsically copyable in the way that food and fuel are not. You have to build dams to keep ideas from flowing. [[2023_11_30]] > The more the government thinks of itself as an open platform instead of a centralized bureaucracy, the better it will be for all of us, citizens and activists and entrepreneurs alike. [[2023_11_30]] > 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. Build a tangled bank.