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Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation Audible Audiobook – Unabridged

4.4 out of 5 stars 1,524 ratings

One of our most innovative, popular thinkers takes on - in exhilarating style - one of our key questions: "Where do good ideas come from?"

With Where Good Ideas Come From, Steven Johnson pairs the insight of his best-selling Everything Bad Is Good for You and the dazzling erudition of The Ghost Map and The Invention of Air to address an urgent and universal question: What sparks the flash of brilliance? How does groundbreaking innovation happen?

Answering in his infectious, culturally omnivorous style, using his fluency in fields from neurobiology to popular culture, Johnson provides the complete, exciting, and encouraging story of how we generate the ideas that push our careers, our lives, our society, and our culture forward.

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Product details

Listening Length 7 hours and 10 minutes
Author Steven Johnson
Narrator Eric Singer
Whispersync for Voice Ready
Audible.com Release Date October 05, 2010
Publisher Penguin Audio
Program Type Audiobook
Version Unabridged
Language English
ASIN B0045BXDAO
Best Sellers Rank #45,185 in Audible Books & Originals (See Top 100 in Audible Books & Originals)
#28 in Creativity & Genius
#51 in Popular Psychology Creativity & Genius
#55 in History of Science

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4.4 out of 5 stars
1,524 global ratings

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Customers find the book highly readable and thought-provoking, filled with insightful concepts that help them understand the benefits of serendipity. Moreover, they appreciate its efficiency, with one customer noting how it starts out really well. However, the story length receives mixed feedback, with several customers finding it repetitive.

AI-generated from the text of customer reviews

90 customers mention "Readability"87 positive3 negative

Customers find the book highly readable and interesting, with one customer specifically praising its wonderful Johnson-style prose.

"...It is a uniquely hopeful book - a message of tangible, practical hope for global citizens faced with seemingly insurmountable challenges of survival..." Read more

"...Pros: lovely meditative writing style, with lots of nature imagery. A small number of really good ideas about innovation, and many helpful examples...." Read more

"There have been a number of interesting books in recent years on ideas, creativity, innovation and the forces that shape the progress of the human..." Read more

"...A great read for anyone interested in the subject." Read more

86 customers mention "Thought provoking"83 positive3 negative

Customers find the book thought-provoking, praising its insightful concepts and innovative lessons, with one customer highlighting how it shows the development of ideas and another noting its great conceptual thread throughout.

"...It is a uniquely hopeful book - a message of tangible, practical hope for global citizens faced with seemingly insurmountable challenges of survival..." Read more

"...A small number of really good ideas about innovation, and many helpful examples. Cons: a little bit meta, a little bit strange...." Read more

"...title that sounds sort of warm and fuzzy, puts forth some interesting ideas about ideas, with quite a few meaty and entertaining anecdotes from wide..." Read more

"...In addition to these two fascinating and important concepts, the book discusses an array of other concepts that have proven to be a source of..." Read more

19 customers mention "Insight"19 positive0 negative

Customers find the book insightful, providing perspective and helping them understand the benefits of serendipity, with one customer noting how it makes great parallels between dissimilar topics.

"...The book is well written and insightful. Highly recommended." Read more

"...In that way, it is an energizing experience to follow his flow of thought. By the end of the book, it is ironic (or is it?)..." Read more

"...It really gave me some perspective as someone who wishes to get into the tech industry...." Read more

"...The interwoven analogy and stories of Darwin and the coral reef was a mega bonus to keep me interested and visualizing standing on the shores...." Read more

5 customers mention "Efficiency"5 positive0 negative

Customers appreciate the book's efficiency, with one noting its timeliness, another highlighting its slow hunches approach, and a third mentioning how it helps avoid procrastination.

"...This work is timely, a shape-shifter and contains, in my opinion, the type of thinking required for re-evaluating the current foundation, energy and..." Read more

"...why Internet search can actually enhance serendipity as well as be efficient...." Read more

"...It certainly helped me understand the benefits of serendipity, slow hunches, and openness with respect to innovations." Read more

"...work with ideas that will actually help you dissolve clots and avoid procrastination...." Read more

17 customers mention "Story length"5 positive12 negative

Customers find the story length of the book unsatisfactory, with multiple reviews noting that it is repetitive and contains uninteresting trivia.

"...The references and bibliography are textbook quality. Yes, the book may be too long - most books are. But who would buy a 20-page summary?..." Read more

"...Some of the stories seem repetitive. But easy to skim or skip without missing too much." Read more

"...some interesting ideas about ideas, with quite a few meaty and entertaining anecdotes from wide ranging sources...." Read more

"...Some repetition was irritating...." Read more

Top reviews from the United States

  • Reviewed in the United States on December 13, 2010
    This is THE BEST BOOK I read in 2010. PERIOD. I am pleased to recognize Steven Johnson's work, Where Good Ideas Come From - The Natural History of Innovation, (Riverhead Books - Published by The Penguin Group New York, NY Copyright © 2010 by Steven Johnson).

    In an era when the U.S. requires some creative thinkers to point the way ahead, I urge you and yours to devour this work. This work is timely, a shape-shifter and contains, in my opinion, the type of thinking required for re-evaluating the current foundation, energy and trajectory applicable to individuals, organizations (BOTH public and private sector), entrepreneurs, diplomats, inventors, faith-based communities etc.

    What's the thesis of this work? Listen to Steven Johnson:

    "If there is a single maxim that runs through this book's arguments, it is that we are often better served by connecting ideas than we are by protecting them. Like the free market itself, the case for restricting the flow of innovation has long been buttressed by appeals to the "natural " order of things. But the truth is, when one looks at innovation in nature and in culture, environments that build walls around good ideas tend to be less innovative in the long run than more open-ended environments. Good ideas may not want to be free, but they do want to connect, fuse, recombine. They want to reinvent themselves by crossing conceptual borders. They want to complete each other as much as they want to compete." P.22 (emphasis is mine).

    The U.S. has always been heralded as the global center for innovation, technological breakthroughs and the quality of a university system that attracts the finest minds from around the world. At present, the U.S. seems to be struggling with a paucity of good ideas and its infrastructure - that has historically produced global admiration (educational achievement, patents, new industries, technologies, strategic partnerships and economic prowess) - has been characterized by a myriad of measures as "in decline."

    This book stirred my patriotic fervor, as well as my competitive and creative juices. It didn't just stir me up - it somehow rearranged some things for me - at a soul level. It is a uniquely hopeful book - a message of tangible, practical hope for global citizens faced with seemingly insurmountable challenges of survival and daily life.

    As Johnson writes, Reading remains an unsurpassed vehicle for the transmission of interesting new ideas and perspectives. P.112

    Thus, I am NOT going to litter this review with too many excerpts from Johnson's work that would encourage you to make a judgment that simply reading a review of it was somehow sufficient. Here's what happened to me after I read Where Good Ideas Come From - The Natural History of Innovation -- I immediately went out and devoured two of Johnson's previous, acclaimed works The Invention of Air and The Ghost Map.

    From time to time, cultures produce thinkers whose ideas are simply essential, timely and (hopefully) infectious. These people and their ideas seem to rise up at times during certain historical epochs when they are desperately needed -- and may be deemed counter intuitive to the mainstream thinking that seems to be widely accepted.

    As Johnson says in The Ghost Map: "The river of intellectual progress is not defined purely by the steady flow of good ideas begetting better ones; it follows the topography that has been carved out for it by external factors. Sometimes that topography throws up so many barricades that the river backs up for a while." P. 135

    Where Good Ideas Come From - The Natural History of Innovation is a force that pierces the barricades that are currently preventing the natural flow of human ingenuity from proceeding as constructively and as freely as it might. This book is inhabited by the essential inertia that is fundamental to our present and our future - individually and collectively.

    I can unequivocally declare this work to be The Best Book I read in 2010.
    12 people found this helpful
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  • Reviewed in the United States on October 6, 2015
    As fluffy quasi-technical bestsellers go, this one was pretty good. Good enough, in fact, that after reading it I bought two additional copies which I used as thank you gifts in a professional setting. Pros: lovely meditative writing style, with lots of nature imagery. A small number of really good ideas about innovation, and many helpful examples. Cons: a little bit meta, a little bit strange. Specifically, he also discusses his own technique for managing a database of quotes and ideas; then you realize that the work itself is based on this collection, which accounts for some portions of the book that are a bit thin or lacking in through line. Or maybe more deeply explicated than what the point is worth. For some readers this might actually be a positive, an inspiration, a fresh or original element. Because I lean to denser, more technical works (George Eliot, anyone? (; ), to me it's a disadvantage. One ought to do better at hiding the machinations. It would be either a good beach read, for a technical person, or a striking source of inspiration, for a more artsy one. If you don't want to get it and read it, you could settle for looking up 'the adjacent possible'.
    13 people found this helpful
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  • Reviewed in the United States on April 17, 2011
    There have been a number of interesting books in recent years on ideas, creativity, innovation and the forces that shape the progress of the human race, including The Rational Optimist by Matt Ridley and The Nature of Technology by W. Brian Arthur.

    This book, despite a title that sounds sort of warm and fuzzy, puts forth some interesting ideas about ideas, with quite a few meaty and entertaining anecdotes from wide ranging sources. Johnson relates the fascinating history of many interesting ideas such as the World Wide Web, GPS, YouTube, the pacemaker, the air conditioner, the triode, the theory of island formation, the printing press, the nature of neural connections, the method of transmission of cholera and many others.

    Johnson's definition of ideas is not limited to human ideas. He includes good ideas by chemical and biological actors through evolution in his definition.

    While this may seem unusual, it is completely consistent with Johnson's view of progress. He begins with the notion of the "adjacent possible", which is the set of possibilities enabled by taking one step beyond the current state of things. The notion is that most ideas are variants on things that already exist. It is accumulations of these variations that comprise progress. This is consistent with biologist Francois Jacob's notion of evolution as a tinkerer, rather than an engineer. Johnson notes that there are exceptions. But even in the case of of revolutionary theories, there are often preconditions which set the stage for Darwin and Wallace to both discover evolution, or Newton and Leibniz to both invent calculus.

    Following from this premise, what is needed to foster ideas is an environment which continually brings together existing concepts by being both sufficiently dense and fluid to create fruitful new combinations. This is why a coral reef is a fertile ecosystem, urban environments are hotbeds of cultural progress and the Internet fosters advances of all kinds at an unprecedented rate.
    A couple of interesting examples of bringing together ideas from different areas are the application of the wine press to printing books by Gutenberg, and the application of the punch card, invented for mechanical looms, to data processing.

    Johnson discusses the commonplace book, a type of scrapbook used by John Locke, Francis Bacon, John Milton, Joseph Preistley, Erazmus Darwin and Charles Darwin to not only save interesting ideas from different sources, but index them so as to bring loosely connected entries together in the author's mind. Johnson has implemented his own modern day commonplace book using a software tool called DevonThink.

    The latter portion of the book is a discussion of individual vs network and market driven vs "open source" in the generation of inventions. He sees a historical shift over time from the individual, market driven inventor to the the networked, open source model of invention. In this argument, his is somewhat at odds with the views of Matt Ridley, whose Rational Optimist argues persuasively that trade and the market have always been the driving force behind progress and the evolution of ideas.

    His arguments are largely consistent with the thesis of Arthur's The Nature of Technology, also excellent. Arthur is somewhat more narrowly focused but also compelling in his case for incremental progress.

    Johnson also a large appendix which contains a chronicle of key innovations from 1400-2000 with a paragraph on each.

    The book is well written and insightful. Highly recommended.
    14 people found this helpful
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  • Damien Hartmann
    5.0 out of 5 stars Une perspective éclairante sur la génération des innovations
    Reviewed in France on May 29, 2017
    L'innovation est au coeur des discours actuels dans tous les domaines : économie, sport, loisirs, développement personnel... Cet essai très bien écrit propose une histoire de la génération d'innovation qui ont transformé le monde, et à travers cela une analyse sur les facteurs clés qui contribuent à leur apparition et à leur développement. J'y vois un excellent plaidoyer en faveur du partage des connaissances et de l'open source, qui conforte mon enthousiasme pour ces domaines. Une lecture à mettre entre toutes les mains, pour contribuer à améliorer le monde !
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  • Felipe
    5.0 out of 5 stars My notes:
    Reviewed in Brazil on February 19, 2019
    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.

    If we want to understand where good ideas come from, we have to put them in context. Darwin’s world-changing idea unfolded inside his brain, but think of all the environments and tools he needed to piece it together: a ship, an archipelago, a notebook, a library, a coral reef. Our thought shapes the spaces we inhabit, and our spaces return the favor. The argument of this book is that a series of shared properties and patterns recur again and again in unusually fertile environments.

    In the language of complexity theory, 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.

    Traveling across these different environments and scales is not merely intellectual tourism. Science long ago realized that we can understand something better by studying its behavior in different contexts.

    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

    Good ideas are like the NeoNurture device. They are, inevitably, constrained by the parts and skills that surround them. We have a natural tendency to romanticize breakthrough innovations, imagining momentous ideas transcending their surroundings, a gifted mind somehow seeing over the detritus of old ideas and ossified tradition. But ideas are works of bricolage; they’re built out of that detritus. We take the ideas we’ve inherited or that we’ve stumbled across, and we jigger them together into some new shape.

    The strange and beautiful truth about the adjacent possible is that its boundaries grow as you explore those boundaries. Each new combination ushers new combinations into the adjacent possible. Think of it as a house that magically expands with each door you open. You begin in a room with four doors, each leading to a new room that you haven’t visited yet. Those four rooms are the adjacent possible. But once you open one of those doors and stroll into that room, three new doors appear, each leading to a brand-new room that you couldn’t have reached from your original starting point. Keep opening new doors and eventually you’ll have built a palace.

    In the early 1920s, two Columbia University scholars named William Ogburn and Dorothy Thomas decided to track down as many multiples as they could find, eventually publishing their survey in an influential essay with the delightful title “Are Inventions Inevitable?” Ogburn and Thomas found 148 instances of independent innovation, most them occurring within the same decade.

    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.

    Recall the question we began with: 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.

    In a way, the engineers at Mission Control had it easier than most. Challenging problems don’t usually define their adjacent possible in such a clear, tangible way. Part of coming up with a good idea is discovering what those spare parts are, and ensuring that you’re not just recycling the same old ingredients.

    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.

    Most theories of life’s origins incorporate some variation of the “primordial soup”: an environment where novel combinations could occur thanks to the swirl and flow of liquid. Carbon may be a talented connector, but without a medium that allows it to collide randomly with other elements, those connective powers are likely to go to waste. All those spectacular polymer chains would remain unrealized, hidden behind the locked doors of the adjacent possible.

    With a science like molecular biology, we inevitably have an image in our heads of the scientist alone in the lab, hunched over a microscope, and stumbling across a major new finding. But Dunbar’s study showed that those isolated eureka moments were rarities. Instead, most important ideas emerged during regular lab meetings, where a dozen or so researchers would gather and informally present and discuss their latest work.

    But the Phoenix memo might well have been instrumental in stopping the attacks had it followed a pattern that recurs throughout the history of world-changing ideas. It was a hunch that needed to collide with another hunch.

    A metropolis shares one key characteristic with the Web: both environments are dense, liquid networks where information easily flows along multiple unpredictable paths. Those interconnections nurture great ideas, because most great ideas come into the world half-baked, more hunch than revelation.

    Hunches that don’t connect are doomed to stay hunches.

    Because these slow hunches need so much time to develop, they are fragile creatures, easily lost to the more pressing needs of day-to-day issues.

    But if one examines the intellectual fossil record closely, the slow hunch is the rule, not the exception.

    It is simply hard to pinpoint exactly when Darwin had the idea, because the idea didn’t arrive in a flash; it drifted into his consciousness over time, in waves. In the months before the Malthus reading, we could probably say that Darwin had the idea of natural selection in his head, but at the same time was incapable of fully thinking it. This is how slow hunches often mature: by stealth, in small steps. They fade into view.

    Keeping a slow hunch alive poses challenges on multiple scales. For starters, you have to preserve the hunch in your own memory, in the dense network of your neurons. Most slow hunches never last long enough to turn into something useful, because they pass in and out of our memory too quickly, precisely because they possess a certain murkiness. You get a feeling that there’s an interesting avenue to explore, a problem that might someday lead you to a solution, but then you get distracted by more pressing matters and the hunch disappears. So part of the secret of hunch cultivation is simple: write everything down.

    We can see Darwin’s ideas evolve because on some basic level the notebook platform creates a cultivating space for his hunches; it is not that the notebook is a mere transcription of the ideas, which are happening offstage somewhere in Darwin’s mind. Darwin was constantly rereading his notes, discovering new implications. His ideas emerge as a kind of duet between the present-tense thinking brain and all those past observations recorded on paper.

    The work of dreams turns out to be a particularly chaotic, yet productive, way of exploring the adjacent possible. In a sense, dreams are the mind’s 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.

    Serendipity needs unlikely collisions and discoveries, but it also needs something to anchor those discoveries. Otherwise, your ideas are like carbon atoms randomly colliding with other atoms in the primordial soup without ever forming the rings and lattices of organic life.

    “The errors of the great mind exceed in number those of the less vigorous one.”

    error is not simply a phase you have to suffer through on the way to genius. Error often creates a path that leads you out of your comfortable assumptions.

    Being right keeps you in place. Being wrong forces you to explore.

    Paradigm shifts, in Kuhn’s argument, begin with anomalies in the data, when scientists find that their predictions keep turning out to be wrong.
    When we’re wrong, we have to challenge our assumptions, adopt new strategies. Being wrong on its own doesn’t unlock new doors in the adjacent possible, but it does force us to look for them.

    big cities nurture subcultures much more effectively than suburbs or small towns.

    Lifestyles or interests that deviate from the mainstream need critical mass to survive; they atrophy in smaller communities not because those communities are more repressive, but rather because the odds of finding like-minded people are much lower with a smaller pool of individuals.

    The cultural diversity those subcultures create is valuable not just because it makes urban life less boring. The value also lies in the unlikely migrations that happen between the different clusters. A world where a diverse mix of distinct professions and passions overlap is a world where exaptations thrive.

    Legendary innovators like Franklin, Snow, and Darwin all possess 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.

    In a real sense, for Snow to make his great breakthrough in understanding cholera, he had to think like a molecular chemist and like a physician. As a slow multitasker, he had those interpretative systems readily available to him when his focus turned to the mystery of cholera. As we saw with the feathers of Archaeopteryx, 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.

    This is a wonder which does not at first strike the eye of the body, but, after reflection, the eye of reason.”

    The platform builders and ecosystem engineers do not just open a door in the adjacent possible. They build an entire new floor.

    Ideas rise in crowds, as Poincaré said. They rise in liquid networks where connection is valued more than protection.

    The patterns are simple, but followed together, they make for a whole that is wiser than the sum of its parts. 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.
  • Oparazzo
    5.0 out of 5 stars Pflichtlektüre für Chief Innovation Officers
    Reviewed in Germany on July 13, 2013
    Ach, wenn man Innovation doch erzwingen könnte! Dann hätten all die Vorgesetzten und Personalchefs gute Gründe, einen auf die einschlägigen Seminare zu schicken, bei denen man sich damit die Zeit vertreibt, sein Brain zu stormen oder für alberne Probleme noch albernere Lösungen zu finden (ich werde z. B. nie vergessen, wie wir - erwachsene Menschen - im Team!! - eine möglichst hohen Turm aus Papier basteln mussten).

    Steven Johnsons neuestes Werk belegt klar und ausführlich, dass keine der durchschlagenden Ideen, Entdeckungen und Erfindungen der letzten fünf Jahrhunderte im Rahmen eines Brainstormings oder durch kreativitätsfördernde Zwangsbeglückung entstanden sind. In sieben Kapiteln beschreibt er die wahren Rahmenbedingungen, die Innovation befruchten, aber auch die Einschränkungen, die sie verhindern oder verzögern.

    Dabei zieht sich Darwins Entdeckung wie ein roter Faden durch das Buch: Ebenso wie die Evolution gerne nur als Ergebnis eines ständigen Konkurrenzkampfs missverstanden wird, wird auch dem Wettbewerb im Markt ein viel zu innovationsfördernder Charakter zugeschrieben. Wettbewerb führt zu Abgrenzung, während die Entstehung von Ideen von Durchlässigkeit und fachübergreifendem Denken lebt, ganz in Analogie zu der Vielfalt, die Darwin in den Korallenriffen des Indischen Ozeans beobachtet hatte, und die entstanden war aus den synergetischen Beziehungen zwischen den einzelnen Lebensformen und der "Bereitschaft" der Natur, sich dem Zufall zu überlassen.

    Auch wenn "Where Good Ideas Come From" kein Selbsthilfebuch ist, gibt Steven Johnson immer wieder konkrete Hinweise, wovon Ideen leben, und er beschreibt, was wirklich innovative Firmen in dieser Richtung tun. Die vielen Beispiele sprechen ohnehin für sich. Aber, wie es der Name des Buchs schon sagt, konzentriert er sich nur auf die Entstehung von Ideen - die Mühsal der Umsetzung, die neben Glück und Talent vor allem Fleiß erfordert, ist nicht sein Thema. Das kann dazu führen, dass für manchen frustrierten Leser/Erfinder das spielerisch-zufällige etwas zu sehr im Vordergrund steht. Gerade deshalb ist es aber eine Pflichtlektüre für alle, zu deren Aufgaben es gehört, den Nährboden für neue Ideen zu bereiten, nicht durch Personaltrainer-Gimmicks, sondern durch durch fruchtbare Arbeitsbedingungen.
  • M. Hillmann
    5.0 out of 5 stars Chance favours the connected mind
    Reviewed in the United Kingdom on November 15, 2010
    The common image of the individual operating alone in the laboratory dreaming up brilliant flashes of inspiration is countered by Johnson with the argument that ideas are generated by crowds where connection is more important than protection.

    Steven Johnson's technique is the personalisation of his theme, drawing unexpected conclusions from the personal story and then weaving it into the next story. For example he brings to life through stories his assertion that good ideas are built on previous work and depend upon the variety of other stimuli around them. He recounts how in the late 1870's a Parisian obstetrician named Stephane Tarnier took a day off from his work at Maternite de Paris and paid a visit to the nearby Paris Zoo where chicken eggs were being incubated. It gave Tarnier the inspiration to develop incubation for babies leading to a medical advance that rivals any more well known innovations, such as radiation therapy or double heart bypass, in terms of giving humans longer life. Then follows the sequel about Timothy Prestero, an MIT professor who visited the Indonesian city of Meulaboh after the 2004 Indian Tsunami. He discovered that eight baby incubators, donated by a range of international organisations, were broken down through lack of spare parts. Prestoro and his team decided to build an incubator out of car parts that were abundant in the developing world - an idea that had originated with a Boston doctor named Jonathon Rosen. From this Johnson asserts that good ideas develop like this NeoNurture incubator. "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."

    The astounding detail in this short paragraph brings a richness to his arguments about the generation of ideas.

    Johnson counters the colloquial description of good ideas as sparks, flashes or eureka moments and likens them to networks. For new ideas the sheer size of network is needed and it needs to be plastic - capable of reconfiguration. Innovation thrives on a wide pool of minds. The eureka moment is usually preceded by the slow hunch like Darwin's theory of evolution that developed over many years.

    Johnson extols the power of accidental connections or serendipity in the recognition of the significance of the new ideas. Innovation prospers when ideas can be serendiptiously connected and recombined with other ideas, when hunches can stumble across other hunches. Walls dividing ideas such as patents, trade secrets and proprietary technology inhibit serendipidy. Open environments are more conducive to innovation than closed.

    Error which creates a path that leads you out of your comfort zone and exaptation , which are traits optimised for a specific use getting hijacked for a completely different use (birds feathers evolved for warmth proving useful for flying) are key paths to innovation. The history of the world wide web designed for the academic environment now used for shopping, sharing photos and Google.

    Johnson classifies sources of key innovations from 1400 to the present day according to whether they were driven by the individual or a network and whether they were market driven or non market. He concludes that non market, open platform networked approach is now far more prolific. Witness Google, Twitter, Amazon.

    Powerful , often controversial but immensely readable. The appendix alone describing the key innovations from 1400 to now is a fascinating read.
  • roberto
    5.0 out of 5 stars me cargaron 4 veces 114.75 la compra de un libro
    Reviewed in Mexico on December 10, 2014
    Compre libro where good ideas come from según pedido D01-193245-1338712 me cargaron 2 veces 114.75 reclame en banamex y me dijeron que fueron Amazon mexico quien realzo 2 cargos. Cancele para que me quitaran cargos fue así.
    Por cuestiones de examen en una universidad americana que me pidió resumen de dicho libro tuve que volver a fincar pedido D01-1932145- 1338712 me cargaron otra vez 2 veces 114.75
    Aun cuando ya había comprado en Amazon.com No México con ellos no tuve el fraude que cometen su personal. Porque hasta ahora reclamo porque espere respuesta del Banco y a lo que llegaron fue que México Amazon esta cometiendo esta tropelías. Solicito respuesta antes de quejarme con una autoridad judicial
    Roberto Sandoval Sanchez