Where Good Ideas Come From The Natural History of Innovation by Steven Johnson

Where Good Ideas Come From The Natural History of Innovation by Steven Johnson

This book is a history of how good ideas and inventions come into being.  It is very scientific and technically oriented focusing on Charles Darwin, James D. Watson, Willis Haviland Carrier, Enrico Fermi, and other people with breakthrough ideas.  At the same time, it uses historical examples to extrapolate ways that individuals will likely become more innovative.

Some of the ideas behind the book are not intuitive.  For example, Tim Berner's Lee development of the world wide web occurred over a long time period without any single eureka moment.  Many ideas come from slow continuous development.

Steven Johnson describes many ways to increase individual innovation; keep a diary, browse libraries, bookstores, and the internet, have workspaces which mix order and disorder, keep a wide variety of hobbies, and go to places where ideas flow freely like cafes and innovative spaces. 

The author uses lots of stories and examples to illustrate his points.  He even has a timeline of innovation in the appendix of this book.  The Notes and Further Reading section cites numerous authors like Clay Shirky, Charles Darwin, Jaron Lanier, Malcolm Gladwell, Edward O. Wilson, and Lawrence Lessig.  This book will have an especially strong appeal to people interested in computers and new media.

The book is not just about individual ways that people can innovate.  It also describes some causes of innovation like serendipity, exaptation, and error. In addition it goes beyond the individual to include examples of environmental factors.  For example, cities condense the amount of people freeing people to try new things, and platforms like Twitter increase the ability to communicate new ideas.

I found the book to be very well organized.  This made it easy to think about what I was reading.  In addition to the appendix which had the Chronology of Key Innovations 1400 to 2000 and the Notes and Further Reading, there was a bibliography and index.  This is a very well put together book.  Amanda Dewey is listed as the designer for the book.  If you look on the internet, she has designed quite a few bestsellers.

Daily Thoughts 10/12/2010 (Where Good Ideas Come From, Open Source)

Smiles, Galloway
Daily Thoughts 10/12/2010

Today has started off quietly.  I checked the displays.  I also had a meeting with a gentleman from SCORE Counselors to America's Small Business to set up one on one counseling sessions.  I think it went well.  I also called the EERE Information Center to request promotional material for Energy Awareness month which is this month, October.

I also did some weeding in the oversize 300s and picked out some large print books to go on the bookmobile which will go out tomorrow.

Sometimes, I think about open source.  I use Open Office  http://www.openoffice.org/ at home.  Also, I've found many social networks are built on open source code.  Digg, Twitter, and Facebook use Cassandra as the backend database http://cassandra.apache.org/

I read some more of Where Good Ideas Come From by Stephen Johnson on the train home.  He is talking about how accidents create many new ideas.  He also reminds us that near perfect Six Sigma environments are not conducive to accidents of design that lead to innovation.  I like his admonition that it is just as importan to browse through the web and through libraries to find good ideas as it is to write everything down.  I do both daily.

Daily Thoughts 10/7/2010 (New York Comic Con, Where Good Ideas Come From)

The Wally Pug of Why, 1896

Daily Thoughts 10/7/2010

I finished reading The Shadow Market last night.  It seems to be focused on the decline of the United States and Europe as capitalist powers and a shift eastward towards China and the Middle East.  I found it to be interesting, but not completely convincing.



I started reading Where Good Ideas Come From The Natural History of Innovation by Steven Johnson.  A couple of ideas that he immediately put out were that cities generate more innovation and the internet also generates a lot of new ideas.



I am putting together a display on climate and environmental change.  I am picking out books on hurricanes, extreme weather, global warming, and climate change.  It is an interesting topic. 


Gail Carriger's book Blameless came in for me to read.  It is a steampunk, vampire, werewolf romance.  In other words an entertaining mashup.

I am going to talk to a gentleman about having one on one SCORE counseling for small business on Tuesday.  Hopefully, it will work out well.  I also have a few other things which I still have to confirm.  I have to figure out my events for next month.

There are a lot of small details to work on; shelf reading, weeding, looking at our website to see if anything needs to change.

Tomorrow from 10:00-1:00 p.m., I have a free professional pass to New York Comic Con.  I have a couple different places I want to visit.  I got an invitation from For Beginner Books to stop by as well as from Abrams Art Books, and I definitely will look at NBM which I always stop by to look at.   I am also going to stop by Booth #434 which is the American Library Association booth for the big picture at 11:30 a.m.  I think I'll see several people that I may know.

I read some more of Where Good Ideas Come From and learned a little bit.  Part of the process of having a good idea is to build on a slow hunch.  Charles Darwin's journals are excellent examples of the slow build up of an idea.  Also the world wide web took quite a while to develop as an idea.  Tim Berners Lee did not describe any epiphany moment in creating the idea of the web.  One of the better ways to develop ideas is to keep a journal over a long period of time.  I think that this blog has helped me slowly develop quite a few ideas.