COP3 : Book - Where good ideas come from the natural history of innovation – Stephen Johnson.

Where good ideas come from the natural history of innovation – Stephen Johnson.

Notes :

Chapter 1: Reef, city, web. 

Talks about Darwin's adventure to killing island, where he discovers a reef. He is impressed by how much life varies in the coral reef (page 4) there is more alive in the coral reef then there is on land/in the normalcy. You come across a couple of fish at the time in the normalcy that on a reef its thousands.

Scientists notice as life gets bigger it slows down. The flight leaves the days, and elephant lives for half a century (page 8). Max Kleiber worked out overall "negative quarter-power scaling" works out the heart rate and how many × longer that animal would live compared to a smaller one. Geoffrey West decided to use Kleiber's fairy and apply it to cities. He found that everything worked and followed the rule, a city that is 10 × bigger has 10 × more gas stations. Except when it came to creativity, it would be 17 × more creative. The bigger the city the more innovative and creative by a long way (page 10)

(Page 10) "quests power laws suggested something far more provocative: that despite all the noise and crowding and distractions, the average resident of a metropolis with population of 5 million people was almost 3 × more creative than the average resident in the town of 100,000. Something makes residents of big cities more creative."

(Page 16) – page 16 talks about how to measure innovation. The best way is to look at the job that the technology or whatnot allows you to do. The breakthrough that allows you to do two jobs is said of one is better.

"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."

(Page 18/19) – interesting points. (Page 22)

Chapter 2: the adjacent possible.

Chapter 2 talks about a doctor, who created the incubator for premature babies. He did this by going to a zoo and seeing chicken egg incubators. Page 25. 66% of babies used to be die, so when the doctor saw the chicken incubator he was able to make the connection within his brain that this would be good idea to babies. The death rate went to 38% thus saving a lot of babies.

(Page 27) tells a story about debaters in the Third World countries. In Third World countries they get sent old pieces of equipment but they do not have the resources to maintain them so ultimately they break and become useless. Someone wanted to solve this problem, and came up with a solution. In third world countries they do have the resources to fix cars, so the solution was to build an incubator made solely out of car parts which were easy to repair and always available.

"Ideas are works of bricolage; they're built out of that detritus. We take ideas we have inherited or that we stumbled across, and we tickle them together into some new shape." (Page 28)

our bodies/lives were made of all the same bits at the beginning of time, you couldn't just make a sunflower things needed to evolve. Scientist Stewart Kaufman came up with the name 'the adjacent possible'

"the phrase captures both the limits and the creative potential of change and innovation." (Page 31)

"the adjacent possible is  a kind of shadow future."

The world can change at any moment but only certain changes can happen. Boundaries grow as you search the boundaries of the adjacent possible. Like going in one door to find a room with four more doors and then you can go through a doors and then find eight more doors. An example of things constantly evolving. (Page 31)

(quote on page 32 at the bottom)

each new innovation opens new patterns to explore. (Page 33) talks about the adjacent possible and cities compared to towns.

"Good ideas are not conjured out of thin air; they are built out of a collection of existing parts, the composition of which explains (and occasionally constrains) overtime" (page 35)

innovation needs to be possible, it has to have the correct technology, to able it etc, otherwise the idea remains just that, an idea (page 36) ideas can be ahead of their time.

(Page 37 – 40) examples in history of the above, where the idea has been ahead of the time. It also talks about examples where things happened at exactly the right time like for example YouTube. YouTube could only happen at that time because the software had been developed, and also the computer was becoming more popular and readily available to society. If YouTube had been invented 10 years before it would not have worked, because it was not within the adjacent possible, and therefore it would not have worked out.

"The trick is to figure out ways to explore the edges of possibility that surrounds you" (page 41)

(page 41 – 42) talks about creative spaces and how to harness it

Further notes

This book was really interesting, explaining the history of innovation at all stages. I feel it has given me a better insight into how innovative and creative thoughts can change humanity. It was also good to see the break down of things that allow creativity like the 'liquid network' and the 'adjacent possible'. All of Stephen johnson's theories worked really well when applied to the example he put forward, in the next book I read  I am going to see if Johnson's theories can work with different scenarios.