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

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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.

• 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.

• 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.

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