Johnson 2010 Penguin Books

Johnson S (2010) Where good ideas come from. The seven patterns of innovation. Penguin Books London:326 pp.

Johnson S (2010) Penguin Books

Abstract: 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 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.

• Bioblast editor: Gnaiger E

Selected quotes

• p 21: Analyzing innovation on the scale of individuals and organizations - as the standard textbooks do - distorts our view. It creates a picture of innovation theat overstates the role of proprietary research and "survival of the fittest" competition. The long-zoom apporach 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, wheter 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.

1. The adjacent possible

• p 41: Innovative environments are better at helping their inhabitants explore the adjacent possible, because they expose a wide and diverse sample of spare parts - mechanical and 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 wo satisfying that no one bothers to explore the edges - will, on average, generate and circulate fewer innovations than environments that encourage exploration.

2. Liquid networks

• p 61: .. 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 most productive tool for generating good ideas remains a circle of humans at a table, talking shop.

3. The slow hunch

• p 78: Sustaining the slow hunch is less a matter of perspiration than of cultivation. You give the hunch enough neourishment 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.

• p 83: 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.

• p 84: In its most customary form, "commonplacing", as it was called, involved transcribitn interesting or inspiraitonal passages from one's reading, assembling a personalized encyclopedia of quotations.

• p 93: Early in its history, Google famously instituted a "20-percent time" program for all Google engineers: for every four hours they spend working on official company projects, the engineers are required to spend one hour on their own pet project, guiuded entirely by theor own passions and instincts. .. The only requirements are that they give semiregular updates on their progress to their superiors. Most engineers end up drifting from idea to idea, and the vast majority of those ideas never turn into and official Google product. But every now and then, one of those hunches blooms into something significant.

4. Serendipity

• p 103: In 1965, the German chemist Friedrich August Kekulé von Stradonitz had a daydream by a crackling fire in which he saw a vision of Ouroboros, the sperpent from Greek mythology than devours its own tail. Kekulé had sepnt the past then years of his life exploring the ocnnections of carbon-based moledules. The serpent image in his dream gave him a sudden insight into the molecular structre of the hadrocarbon benzene. The benzene molecule, he realized, was a perfect ring of carbon, with hydrogen atoms surrounding ist outer edges. Kekulé's slow hunch had set the stage for the insight, but for that hunch to turn into a word-changing idea, he needed the most unlikely of conections: an iconic image from ancient mythology.

• p 108: The English language is blessed with a sonderful word that captures the power of accidental connection: "serendipity". ... "always making discoveries, by accident and sagacity, of things they were not in quest of".

• p 125: By keeping its eco-friendly ideas behind of 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 it patents under a modified license permitting use in "non-competitive" fields.

• p 127: The secret to organizational inspiration is to build information networks that allow hunches to persist and siprese and recombine. Instead of clistering your hunches in brainstorm sessions or R&D labs, create an environment where brainstorming is something that is constantly running in the background, throughout the organizaiton, .. A public hunch database makes every passing idea visible to everyone else in the organization, not just management. Other employees can comment or expand on those idease, connecting them with their own hunches about new products or priorities or internal organizational changes.

5. Error

6. Exaptation

7. Platforms

• p 233: adademic research .. new ideas are published wit hthe deliverate goal of allowing other participants to refine and build upon them, with no restrictions on their circulation beyond proper acknowledgement of their origin. .. You can't simply steal a colleague's idea without propr citation, but there is a fundamental difference between suing for patent infringement and asking for a footnote.

• p 241: The natureal state of ideas is flow and spillover and connection. It is society that keeps them in chains.

• p 245: What makes the reef so inventive is not the struggle between the organisms but the way they have learned to collaborate - the coral and the zooxanthellae and the parrotfish borrowing and reinventing each other's work. ... Ideas rise in crowds, as Poincaré said. They rise in liquid networks where connection is valued more than protection.