Innovation Big Ideas Business

Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation (Summary)

by Steven Johnson

What does a coral reef have in common with a modern city? And what do both have to do with the invention of the GPS? The surprising answer is that they are all engines of innovation. Johnson argues that creativity isn't a mysterious gift, but an emergent property of certain environments—and a coral reef's chaotic, interconnected ecosystem has more to teach us about creating breakthrough ideas than the myth of a lone genius in a lab ever will.

Innovation Is Confined by the 'Adjacent Possible'

Breakthroughs don't appear out of thin air. They are new combinations of what's already available. Every new idea is a door that opens into a new room, but you can only open the doors in the room you are currently in. You can't leap ten rooms ahead.

YouTube couldn't have been invented in 1995. Even if the idea existed, the adjacent possible wasn't there yet: high-speed internet wasn't widespread, and the video-sharing software and social platforms that preceded it (like Flash and Friendster) hadn't been built.

Liquid Networks Spark Ideas

Good ideas are more likely to emerge in environments that are densely populated and 'plastic'—where many different ideas can bump into each other, connect, and morph into something new. A solid state is too rigid for new connections, a gaseous state is too chaotic, but a liquid state is just right.

The coffeehouses of 18th-century London were the ultimate liquid network. They brought together people from different fields—merchants, scientists, writers, politicians—in a space where a conversation about shipping routes could collide with a new scientific theory, fueling the Enlightenment.

Breakthroughs Are Slow Hunches, Not Sudden Epiphanies

Most world-changing ideas are not bolts from the blue. They are 'slow hunches' that linger in the back of our minds for months or even years. They only become complete when they connect with another piece of information or, more often, with someone else's slow hunch.

Charles Darwin had the core components of his theory of natural selection for over a decade. It was a lingering hunch that he couldn't fully articulate until he read Thomas Malthus's essay on population, which provided the final piece of the puzzle and allowed his slow hunch to blossom into a complete theory.

Serendipity and Error Drive Discovery

Some of the most important discoveries in history were the result of happy accidents, contamination, or outright mistakes. The key is to work in an environment that allows for these errors and to have the wisdom to recognize them not as failures, but as unexpected opportunities.

The engineer Wilson Greatbatch was trying to build a device to record heart sounds. He accidentally pulled the wrong resistor out of a box—one 1,000 times more powerful than he needed. When he plugged it in, the circuit produced a perfect electrical pulse that mimicked a human heartbeat. He immediately recognized his 'mistake' as the invention of the first implantable pacemaker.

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