Social Connectivity & Innovation — “Where Good Ideas Come From”
The trailer for Steven Berliner Johnson‘s new book, Where Good Ideas Come From, offers some food for thought on the role of social environments in the creation of innovative ideas.
The book is built around dozens of stories from the history of scientific, technological and cultural innovation: how Darwin’s “eureka moment” about natural selection turned out to be a myth; how Brian Eno invented a new musical convention by listening to too much AM radio; how Gutenberg borrowed a crucial idea from the wine industry to invent modern printing; why GPS was accidentally developed by a pair of twenty-somethings messing around with a microwave receiver; how a design team has created a infant incubator made entirely out of spare automobile parts. But I have also tried to distill some meaningful—and hopefully useful—lessons out of all these stories, and so I’ve isolated seven distinct patterns that appear again and again in all these innovative environments. (Each pattern gets its own chapter.) (from StevenBerlinerJohnson.com).
If you want a longer version, here’s a talk Johnson gave at TED, starting with the role the introduction of the coffeehouse (and the replacement of alcoholic beverages with coffee) had on the development of innovation in the U.K.
Related Articles
- Chance Favours the Connected Mind… (customerthink.com)
- People and Places That Innovate (nytimes.com)
- Chance and the Connected Mind (laf.ee)
- Chance favors the connected mind (speedofcreativity.org)
- Where Good Ideas Come From (laughingsquid.com)
- Off the Shelf – In New Books, a Look at People and Places That Innovate – Review – NYTimes.com (nytimes.com)
- “How to get good (transformative) ideas” and related posts (martin-koser.de)
- New books on innovation (rs.resalliance.org)
- Good Ideas and My Thanks to Dorothy Roberts (sociological images)
- Steven Johnson: Where good ideas come from [Greg Laden’s Blog] (scienceblogs.com)
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