Steven Johnson

The Natural History of Innovation

Where Good Ideas Come From

From a coral reef teeming with life to the instant success of YouTube, the author explores what kind of environment fosters the development of good ideas, identifying the seven key principles for generating great notions. By the author of Everything Bad Is Good for You.

Where Good Ideas Come from

Boothby

This one was readable and mostly enjoyable. Another compelling entry in the school of thought that new ideas arise mostly from the new combination and recombination of existing ideas. There were also some useful new elements that I hadn't seen before about the importance of serendipity, ways of cultivating hunches,and the importance of both literal and metaphorical fertile environments for new ideas, namely cities.

Johnson's pretty compelling argument for why cities are so good for ideas is that in cities, there are not only a greater density of innovators, but that people from different backgrounds, different expertise and different ideas are in closer proximitity and are more likely to work closely with each other! The other good thing about ciites is that they're large enough for esoteric communities bound by different interests to have enough people to converge propoerly. Say even if 0.01% of people are into underwater basket weaving--a city of a million would still contain plenty of people to start up an underwater basket-weaving collective.

Johnson is largely optimistic about the internet as a site for idea connection because of the the potential for random connections. However, I also wonder about the limitations from search algorithms--is there less potential for random connection when search is good enough that people find exactly what they were looking for so frequently. ALSO see Safiya Noble's Algorithms of oppression: Google has a vested interest in showing searchers exactly what Google has predicted they already believe.

Dana Kraft

A few things I found particularly interesting in here:
Refutes the concept of innovation driven by a genius working alone.
Thought-provoking, but all-too-brief discussion of whether intellectual property laws help or hurt innovation
Generally buzzword-free description of the value of Twitter (as an innovation, not a business)
Chronology of key innovations over the last 600 years 

Overall very interesting and worth the read.

Where Good Ideas Come From The Natural History of Innovation

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