Warning: This post is long, but I think you'll find it interesting.
I read a book last year called "Where Good Ideas Come From" by Steven Johnson. As the subtitle states, it's about the natural history of innovation and ideas. I found the book very fascinating, informative, and thought-provoking. Plus I learned a bunch about all kinds of inventions. It has a bit of an "evolution" slant I wasn't a complete fan of, but I was able to get past that.
The book starts with an introduction, outlines seven "groups" of things that are innovation starters/concepts, and has a conclusion with graphs and data and stuff of the origins of 200 great ideas / inventions and not just anecdotal evidence.
Here's a "brief" summary of the seven concepts and some of my favorite, most thought-provoking passages from the book.
1. The Adjacent Possible. This is basically the concept that an idea is possible given the current technology and state of things, and it's just waiting for someone to go outside their box or have a "light bulb" moment to implement it. One example given was the invention of the baby incubator in the 1870's. A doctor happened to take a day off to go to the zoo, and when he saw an exhibit of chicken incubators, it triggered an association in his head, and he wondered why the same couldn't be done for human newborns.
"Because incubators focus exclusively on the beginning of life, their benefit to public health - measured by the sheer number of extra years they provide - rivals any medical advance of the twentieth century. Radiation therapy or a double bypass might give you another decade or two, but an incubator gives you an entire lifetime."
"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." "The strange and beautiful truth about the adjacent possible is that its boundaries grow as you explore those boundaries." "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."
"But of course, human minds are not bound by the finite laws of molecule formation, and so every now and then an idea does occur to someone that teleports us forward a few rooms, skipping some exploratory steps in the adjacent possible. But those ideas almost always end up being short-term failures, precisely because they have skipped ahead. We have a phrase for those ideas: we call them 'ahead of their time.' "
"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." "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."
2. Liquid Networks. This one is little more difficult to explain. The concept revolves around the large number of neurons in our brains that can fire with almost infinite combinations. A good idea happens when those neurons fire and connect in a new combination that wasn't tried before.
"Two key preconditions become clear. First, the sheer size of the network. The second precondition is that the network be plastic, capable of adopting new configurations. A dense network incapable of forming new patterns is, by definition, incapable of change, incapable of probing at the edges of the adjacent possible."
"The human brain contains 100 trillion distinct neuronal connections, making it the largest and most complex network on earth. By comparison, there are somewhere on the order of 40 billion pages on the Web. If you assume an average of ten links per page, that means you and I are walking around with a high-density network in our skulls that is orders of magnitude larger than the World Wide Web."
"To make your mind more innovative, you have to place it inside environments that share that same network signature: networks of ideas or people that mimic the neural networks of a mind exploring the boundaries of the adjacent possible."
"Carbon.....hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus, sulfur....these six atoms make up 99 percent of the dry weight of all living organisms on earth." " 'Edge of chaos': the fertile zone between too much order and too much anarchy." "If dispersed tribes of hunter-gatherers are the cultural equivalent of a chaotic, gaseous state, a culture where the information is largely passed down by monastic scribes stands at the opposite extreme. A cloister is a solid." "High-density liquid networks make it easier for innovation to happen, but they also serve the essential function of storing those innovations."
"No matter how smart the 'authorities' may be, if they are outnumbered a thousand to one by the marketplace, there will be more good ideas lurking in the market than in the feudal castle." "Large collectives are rarely capable of true creativity or innovation. (We have the term 'herd mentality' for a reason.)" "This is not the wisdom of the crowd, but the wisdom of someone in the crowd. It's not that the network itself is smart; it's that the individuals get smarter because they're connected to the network."
"Most important ideas emerged during regular lab meetings, where a dozen or so researchers would gather and informally present and discuss their latest work. The ground zero of innovations was not the microscope. It was the conference table." "The quickest way to freeze a liquid network is to stuff people into private offices behind closed doors." "To work in an open office is to work exclusively in public, which turns out to have just as many drawbacks as working entirely in your private lab." I found this particularly interesting and applicable because of the number of cubicle arrangements I've worked in over the past couple years.
3. The Slow Hunch. This is pretty much what it sounds like. It's that idea that niggles and forms over a long period of time and experiences and experiments.
"And so, most great ideas first take shape in a partial, incomplete form. They have the seeds of something profound, but they lack a key element that can turn the hunch into something truly powerful. And more often than not, that missing element is somewhere else, living as another hunch in another person's head. Liquid networks create an environment where those partial ideas can connect; they provide a kind of dating service for promising hunches." "Hunches that don't connect are doomed to stay hunches."
"The snap judgements of intuition - as powerful as they can be - are rarities in the history of the world-changing ideas." "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."
"Part of the secret of hunch cultivation is simple: write everything down." "In its most customary form, 'commonplacing,' as it was called, involved transcribing interesting or inspirational passages from one's reading, assembling a personalized encyclopedia of quotations. 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." Hmmm.....maybe this is why I still maintain a blog?
"You need a system for capturing hunches, but not necessarily categorizing them, because categories can build barriers between disparate ideas, restrict them to their own conceptual islands. This is one way in which the human history of innovation deviates from the natural history. New ideas do not thrive on archipelagos."
4. Serendipity. This is one is pretty much what it sounds like as well. It's the power of accidental connection. You need that little bit of being in the right place at the right time while looking for something else.
"In a sense, dreams are a primordial soup: the medium that facilitates the serendipitous collisions of creative insight. And hunches are like those early carbon atoms, seeking out new kinds of connections to help them build new chains and rings of innovation."
"If you follow the various frequencies of brain-wave activity with an EEG, the effect is not unlike turning the dial on an AM radio: periods of structured, rhythmic patterns, interrupted by static and noise. The brain's systems are 'tuned' for noise, but only in controlled bursts."
"Asexual organisms reproduce on average twice as quickly as their sexual counterparts, in part because without a male/female distinction, every organism is capable of producing offspring directly. But evolution is not just a game of sheer quantity. Overpopulation, after all, poses its own dangers, and a community of organisms with identical DNA makes a prime target for parasites or predators."
"But how do you get those particular clusters of neurons to fire at the right time? One way is to go for a walk. The history of innovation is replete with stories of good ideas that occurred to people while they were out on a stroll. (A similar phenomenon occurs with long showers or soaks in a tub.)" "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." "Carve out dedicated periods where you read a large and varied collection of books and essays in a condensed amount of time."
"We can target what we want, thanks to the Internet. Put a couple of key words into a search engine and you find - with an irritating hit or miss here and there - exactly what you're looking for. It's efficient, but dull. You miss the time-consuming but enriching act of looking through shelves, of pulling down a book because the title interests you, or the binding.....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, and so far no software exists that can duplicate that experience." "Ironically, the problem with the Web is that there's too much noise, too much chaos - that's why the filters were invented in the first place. We have filters because the Web has unleashed too much diversity and surprise, not because we have too little."
"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."
"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 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." "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."
"Brainstorming opens up the flow of ideas and hunches in a more generative fashion than is customary in a regimented workplace meeting. Yet a number of recent studies suggested that brainstorming is less effective than its practitioners would like." "The secret to organizational inspiration is to build information networks that allow hunches to persists and disperse and recombine."
5. Error. Yep - go read the history of penicillin.
"The history of being spectacularly right has a shadow history lurking behind it: a much longer history of being spectacularly wrong, again and again. And not just wrong, but messy. A shockingly large number of transformative ideas in the annals of science can be attributed to contaminated laboratory environments."
"The inventions of radiography, vulcanized rubber, and plastic all depended on generative mistakes that were generative precisely because they connected to slow hunches in the minds of their creators." "Being right keeps you in place. Being wrong forces you to explore." "Paradigm shifts....begin with anomalies in the data, when scientists find that their predictions keep turning out to be wrong." "Being wrong on its own doesn't unlock new doors in the adjacent possible, but it does force us to look for them. The trouble with errors is that we have a natural tendency to dismiss it."
"Psychologists have long been in on the joke that humans free-associate in absurdly predicatable ways." "Individuals who are unusually creative tend to generate more original associations when tested." "The best innovation labs are always a little contaminated."
"Being correct is like the phase-lock states of the human brain, all neurons firing in perfect synchrony. We need the phase-lock state for the same reason we need thrush: a world of complete error and chaos would be unmanagable, on a social and neurochemical level. Innovative environments thrive on useful mistakes, and suffer when the demands of quality control overwhelm them."
6. Exaptation. Something is designed for a specific use, and then the thing is hijacked for a completely different function. These are ideas that serve as jumping off points for tons of other ideas. For example, the printing press. All of the individual components of the printing press were already available, and Gutenberg combined several mature technologies with a few small innovations to create the printing press. One of the key mature technologies he borrowed was the screw press from the wine making industry.
"The history of the World Wide Web is, in a sense, a story of continuous exaptation." "...empahsize 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." "A world where a diverse mix of distinct professions and passions overlap is a world where exaptations thrive."
"But 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." "The most creative individuals in Ruef's survey consistently had broad social networks that extended outside their organization and involved people from diverse fields of expertise. Diverse, horizontal social networks, in Ruef's analysis, were three times more innovative than uniform, vertical networks."
"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."
"Legendary innovators.....all posses some common intellectual qualities - a certain quickness of mind, unbounded curiosity - but they also share one other defining attribute. They have a lot of hobbies." "Chance favors the connected mind."
7. Platforms. These are things that have a disproportionate impact on its ecosystem. One of the examples they gave was a coral reef. I imagine the internet would be as well.
"To date, attempts to measure accurately the full diversity of reef ecosystems have been foiled by the complexity of these habitats; scientists now believe that somewhere between a million and ten million distinct species live in coral reefs around the worlds, despite the fact that those reefs only occupy one-tenth of one percent of the planet's surface." And this is why scuba diving is so interesting. :-)
"The platform builders and ecosystem engineers do not just open a door in the adjacent possible. They build an entire new floor." "Genres supply a set of implicit rules that have enough coherence that traditionalists can safely play inside them, and more adventurous artists can confound our expectations by playing with them. Genres are the platforms and paradigms of the creative world."
"Some of the best ideas for government are likely to come from outside the government." "Government bureaucracies have a long and richly deserved reputation for squelching innovation, but they possess four key elements that may allow them to benefit from the innovation engine of an emergent platform. First, they are repositories of a vast amount of information and services that could be of potential value to ordinary people, if only we could organize it all better. Second, ordinary people have a passionate interest in the kind of information governments deal with, whether it's data about industrial zoning, health-care services, or crime rates. Third, a long tradition exists of citizens committing time and intellectual energy to tackling problems where there is a perceived civic good at stake. And, finally, the fact that governments are not in the private sector means that they do not feel any competitive pressure to keep their data proprietary."
"Platforms have a natural appetite for trash, waste, and abandoned goods." "Artists, poets, and entrepreneurs are the vibrant fish swimming among the coral: they find it easier to live in an exoskeleton that has long since been abandoned by its original host." "The zooanthella and the coral are like two neighbors who miraculously turn out to have a pressing need for each other's garbage, and thus meet every night to swap trash cans."
"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."
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OK, that's it with the quotes. I promise.
This is not the complete list, but below is a sampling of some of the ideas the author considered to be in the top 200. I picked these from the list because I found them relevant to my life by science, electricity, health, and everyday life. Some of them surprised me with how long they have been in existence, and some of them surprised me with how recent they were. Also, keep in mind that on some of these it was when the idea/concept was born and not when it became mass produced or available knowledge to the masses.
1632 - Slide Rule
1645 - Mechanical Calculator
1679 - Pressure Cooker (Wow! That long ago?!)
1700s - Piano
1796 - Smallpox Vaccine
1800 - Electric Battery
1821 - 1850 - Electric Motor
1834 - Refrigerator
1837 - Programmable Computer (The concept for this was mechanical at the time and never completed, but the guy who thought it up and tried to build a prototype basically had all the concepts of a central processing unit, memory, etc. that exist in computers today.)
1897 - Aspirin
1858 - Mason Jar
1862 - Plastic
1865 - Heredity
1885 - Automobile (Henry Ford did not invent it)
1885 - Calculator
1887 - Contact Lenses
1887 - EKG (This one surprised me with how long it has been in existence.)
1901 - Blood Types
1902 - Air Conditioning
1906 - Neurotransmitters
1913 - Moving Assembly Line (Henry Ford did invent this and thus enabled mass production of cars.)
1928 - Penicillin
1935 - Radar
1935 - Tape Recorder
1937 - Nylon
1944 - Modern Computer
1946 - Microwave Oven
1951 - Oral Contraceptive
1958 - Laser
1958 - GPS (The story on this is interesting - you should read about it some time.)
1970 - 1975 - Internet
1976 - Personal Computer
1984 - DNA Forensics
1989 - 1992 - World Wide Web (There is a difference from the internet. The internet allowed networking of computers, but the WWW provided a framework/way to relate pages of information together with links.)
