Where Good Ideas Come From
The Natural History of Innovation

Hmm, here we go again. Another 'popular / best selling' author with a 'great' book full of 'new' insights. Johnson describes where good ideas come from (hence the title) by breaking it down into 7 patterns: the adjacent possible, liquid networks, the slow hunch, serendipity, error, exaptation, platfo......more

I first became acquainted with Where Good Ideas Come From through Steven Johnson's TED talk, which I highly recommend if you've got a spare 17 minutes. In that talk -- and the book -- Johnson argues that most people are wrong when they imagine where new, innovative ideas come from. Many people have......more

This book can be summarized as - where good ideas die. I expected to book to serve as a guide as how inventions evolved into new inventions. Instead the book turned out to be a cross between something like a business book "how to foster new ideas" and a self-help one "how to be more inventive". The......more

There are really only two core ideas in this book: 1. That innovations are best modeled as ideas having sex, in the sense that they don't pop into existence but instead each idea is formed by the process of mixing elements from previous ideas (recombination), or slightly improving on an aspect of th......more

Have you ever heard with half an ear how Leibniz and Newton discovered calculus around the same time? That the same happened for Oxygen? The light bulb? The telephone? Jet engine? Even the transistor? Imagine a place where each door leads to a room with more doors. That's scientific exploration. Mov......more