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e259aee
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If we think that innovation comes from a lone genius inventing a new technology from scratch, that model naturally steers us toward certain policy decisions, like stronger patent protection. But if we think that innovation comes out of collaborative networks, then we want to support different policies and organizational forms: less rigid patent laws, open standards, employee participation in stock plans, cross-disciplinary connections.
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Steven Johnson |
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5f34bb7
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The wetland created by the beaver, like the thriving platform created by the Twitter founders, invites variation because it is an open platform where resources are shared as much as they are protected.
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Steven Johnson |
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89e171e
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if your great-great-great-grandfather wanted to read his book after dark, some poor soul had to crawl around in a whale's head for an afternoon.
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innovation
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steven johnson |
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12cec23
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Her research suggests a paradoxical truth about innovation: good ideas are more likely to emerge in environments that contain a certain amount of noise and error.
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Steven Johnson |
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bfb42da
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But despite the Secret Service-like behavior, and the regal nomenclature, there's nothing hierarchical about the way an ant colony does its thinking. "Although queen is a term that reminds us of human political systems," Gordon explains, "the queen is not an authority figure. She lays eggs and is fed and cared for by the workers. She does not decide which worker does what. In a harvester ant colony, many feet of intricate tunnels and chambe..
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Steven Johnson |
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3c8269f
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Over generations, the gene pool of the first farmers became increasingly dominated by individuals who could drink beer on a regular basis. Most of the world's population today is made up of descendants of those early beer drinkers, and we have largely inherited their genetic tolerance for alcohol.
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Steven Johnson |
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ae8ee50
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Broad Street marked the first time in history when a reasonable person might have surveyed the state of urban life and come to the conclusion that cities would someday become great conquerers of disease. Until then, it looked like a losing battle all the way.
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Steven Johnson |
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a2d5854
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All nucleated organisms generate excess calcium as a waste product. Since at least the Cambrian times, organisms have accumulated those calcium reserves, and put them to good use: building shells, teeth, skeletons. Your ability to walk upright is due to evolution's knack for recycling its toxic waste.
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Steven Johnson |
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ae396a9
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Right now we're in an arms race with the microbes, because, effectively, we're operating on the same scale that they are. The viruses are both our enemy and our arms manufacturer.
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Steven Johnson |
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55a8c8f
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The timing of Thomas Lewis' illness suggests one chilling alternative history. The Broad Street outbreak had subsided in part because the only viable route between the well and the neighborhood's small intestines had run through the cesspool at 40 Broad. When baby Lewis died, the connection had died with it. But when her husband fell ill, Sarah Lewis began emptying the buckets of soiled water in the cesspool all over again. If Snow had not ..
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Steven Johnson |
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b4ab2e8
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The second analog-era mechanism that encourages serendipity involves the physical limitations of the print newspaper, which forces you to pass by a collection of artfully curated stories on a variety of topics before you open up the section that most closely matches your existing passions and knowledge.
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Steven Johnson |
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97b9d88
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If you worked for an hour at the average wage of 1800, you could buy yourself ten minutes of artificial light. With kerosene in 1880, the same hour of work would give you three hours of reading at night. Today, you can buy three hundred days of artificial light with an hour of wages. Something extraordinary obviously happened between the days of tallow candles or kerosene lamps and today's illuminated wonderland. That something was the elec..
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Steven Johnson |
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9e1f7ca
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DR. JOHN SNOW--This well-known physician died at noon on the 16th instant, at his house in Sackville-street, from an attack of apoplexy. His researches on chloroform and other anaesthetics were appreciated by the profession.
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Steven Johnson |
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0d26ef7
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Aided by the young George Pullman, who would later make a fortune building railway cars, Chesbrough launched one of the most ambitious engineering projects of the nineteenth century. Building by building, Chicago was lifted by an army of men with jackscrews. As the jackscrews raised the buildings inch by inch, workmen would dig holes under the building foundations and install thick timbers to support them, while masons scrambled to build a ..
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Steven Johnson |
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c59dcd6
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As Lynn Margulis writes: "All the world's bacteria essentially have access to a single gene pool and hence to the adaptive mechanisms of the entire bacterial kingdom. The speed of recombination over that of mutation is superior: it could take eukaryotic organisms a million years to adjust to a change on a worldwide scale that bacteria can accommodate in a few years."
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Steven Johnson |
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6c361c2
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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.
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Steven Johnson |
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ea9fe84
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Jane Jacobs observed in The Death and Life of Great American Cities: "The larger a city, the greater the variety of its manufacturing, and also the greater both the number and the proportion of its small manufacturers."
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Steven Johnson |
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0879819
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We have a natural tendency to romanticize breakthrough innovations, imagining momentous ideas transcending their surroundings, a gifted mind somehow seeing over the detritus of old ideas and ossified tradition. But ideas are works of bricolage; they're built out of that detritus.
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Steven Johnson |
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0168a23
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This may be one of the most astonishing, and tragic, hummingbird effects in all of twentieth-century technology: someone builds a machine to listen to sound waves bouncing off icebergs, and a few generations later, millions of female fetuses are aborted thanks to that very same technology.
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Steven Johnson |
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12e7f1d
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A good idea is a network. A specific constellation of neurons--thousands of them--fire in sync with each other for the first time in your brain, and an idea pops into your consciousness.
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Steven Johnson |
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b12d2b5
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In the long run, the map was a triumph of marketing as much as empirical science. It helped a good idea find a wide audience.
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Steven Johnson |
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d9fe55c
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for a walk; cultivate hunches; write everything down, but keep your folders messy; embrace serendipity; make generative mistakes; take on multiple hobbies; frequent coffeehouses and other liquid networks; follow the links; let others build on your ideas; borrow, recycle, reinvent. Build a tangled bank.
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Steven Johnson |
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13e4cbe
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Semmelweis was derided and dismissed not just for daring to propose that doctors wash their hands; he was derided and dismissed for proposing that doctors wash their hands if they wanted to deliver babies and dissect corpses in the same afternoon. This
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Steven Johnson |
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cdde7d0
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No doubt some of the euphoria about the Internet's egalitarian promise was overstated, and some advocates did veer into genuine Net utopianism at times. But the people I was interested in were not evangelists for the Internet itself. For them, the Internet was not a cure-all; it was a role model. It wasn't the solution to the problem, but a way of thinking about the problem. One
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Steven Johnson |
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f25809a
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Edison invented the lightbulb the way Steve Jobs invented the MP3 player: he wasn't the first, but he was the first to make something that took off in the marketplace. So
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Steven Johnson |
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cca60fb
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Innovations usually begin life with an attempt to solve a specific problem, but once they get into circulation, they end up triggering other changes that would have been extremely difficult to predict. This is a pattern of change that appears constantly in evolutionary history.
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Steven Johnson |
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5c4d511
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Most discoveries become imaginable at a very specific moment in history, after which point multiple people start to imagine them. The electric battery, the telegraph, the steam engine, and the digital music library were all independently invented by multiple individuals in the space of a few years.
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Steven Johnson |
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a997276
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Diverse, horizontal social networks, in Ruef's analysis, were three times more innovative than uniform, vertical networks. In groups united by shared values and long-term familiarity, conformity and convention tended to dampen any potential creative sparks.
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Steven Johnson |
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76bb21d
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Ronald Burt, looked at the origin of good ideas inside the organizational network of the Raytheon Corporation. Burt found that innovative thinking was much more likely to emerge from individuals who bridged "structural holes" between tightly knit clusters. Employees who primarily shared information with people in their own division had a harder time coming up with useful suggestions"
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Steven Johnson |
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d8650fa
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To a certain extent, Ruef's and Burt's research is a validation of the celebrated "strength of weak ties" argument first proposed by Mark Granovetter,"
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Steven Johnson |
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abccf5a
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the "hummingbird effect." An innovation, or cluster of innovations, in one field ends up triggering changes that seem to belong to a different domain altogether."
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Steven Johnson |
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be81359
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What Ruef discovered was a ringing endorsement of the coffeehouse model of social networking: the most creative individuals in Ruef's survey consistently had broad social networks that extended outside their organization and involved people from diverse fields of expertise. Diverse, horizontal social networks, in Ruef's analysis, were three times more innovative than uniform, vertical networks. In groups united by shared values and long-ter..
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Steven Johnson |
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007c87b
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De Forest was wrong about the utility of gas as a detector, but he kept probing at the edges of that error, until he hit upon something that was genuinely useful. Being right keeps you in place. Being wrong forces you to explore.
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Steven Johnson |
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ef4f82e
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The lightbulb was the kind of innovation that comes together over decades, in pieces. There was no lightbulb moment in the story of the lightbulb.
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Steven Johnson |
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e8c29c2
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Dense urban environments may do away with nature altogether--there are many vibrantly healthy neighborhoods in Paris or Manhattan that lack even a single tree--but they also perform the crucial service of reducing mankind's environmental footprint. Compare the sewage system of a midsized city like Portland, Oregon, with the kind of waste management resources that would be required to support the same population dispersed across the countrys..
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Steven Johnson |
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01b6aef
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There's a reason why the world's wealthiest people--people with near-infinite options vis-a-vis the choice of where to make their home--consistently choose to live in the densest areas on the planet. Ultimately, they live in these spaces for the same reason that the squatter classes of Sao Paulo do: because cities are where the action is. Cities are centers of opportunity, tolerance, wealth creation, social networking, health, population co..
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Steven Johnson |
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a54e5d6
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The wealthiest cities of the world will follow Venice's lead and simply try to engineer their way around the problem. The poorest cities will follow New Orleans' lead--at least so far--and just move to other nearby cities. Either way the poplation stays urban.
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Steven Johnson |
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108490c
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An innovation, or cluster of innovations, in one field ends up triggering changes that seem to belong to a different domain altogether.
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Steven Johnson |
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7689f35
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In other words, a serious crisis of nonrenewable energy resources is likely to accelerate the urbanization trend, not derail it.
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Steven Johnson |
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d74d3f7
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The computer scientist Christopher Langton observed several decades ago that innovative systems have a tendency to gravitate toward the "edge of chaos":"
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Steven Johnson |
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371b29c
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The FBI's information network was a classic closed network: not only could outsiders not access information in it, but also, the system was designed so that documents were carefully shielded from other members of the organization, a legacy of an institution predicated on secrets and "need to know" restrictions."
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Steven Johnson |
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95fdba7
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And so this is why the whole world has suddenly taken an interest in whether Thai poultry workers get their flu shots: because the world wants to ensure that H5N1 stays as far away as possible from ordinary flu viruses.
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Steven Johnson |
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e0bca5d
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Cities were suddenly populated by a class of consumers, free to worry about other pressing matters: new technologies, new modes of commerce, politics, professional sports, celebrity gossip. That
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Steven Johnson |
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82452ec
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Certain shapes and patterns hover over different moments in time, haunting and inspiring the individuals living through those periods. The epic clash and subsequent resolution of the dialectic animated the first half of the nineteenth century; the Darwinian and social reform movements scattered web imagery through the second half of the century. The first few decades of the twentieth century found their ultimate expression in the exuberant ..
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Steven Johnson |