'Where Good Ideas Come From' by Steven Johnson
[Cross-posting latest book summary I added to LinkedIn.]
Where Good Ideas Come From (http://www.amzn.com/1594487715) addresses the topic of innovation with a focus on what the author terms 'good ideas' to avoid narrow semantic definitions of the concept (such as the word 'inventions') and to broadly apply the concept across multiple disciplines and environments.
I always find Steven Johnson to be an entertaining, eclectically knowledgeable writer and this book is similar in style to others (using what he terms his fractal long zoom approach) and often builds on themes he has explored in earlier works such as the value of emergent behavior in ecosystems and cities.
The majority of the book covers seven patterns of innovation, which often are mutually reinforcing, and Johnson cites many historical examples from 1400 to the present to illuminate these patterns. (He also has a lengthy appendix that chronologically summarizes important good ideas over this time period.) The patterns are:
* The Adjacent Possible
* Liquid Networks
* The Slow Hunch
* Serendipity (which contains a shout-out to DEVONthink, my favorite information management software)
* Error
* Exaptation (a term borrowed from evolutionary biology)
* Platforms
The book closes with a four quadrant taxonomy of innovation that attempts to organize various innovations by their origin (market vs non-market based and individual vs network derived). In particular, the author's a fan of the quadrant where good ideas arise from open collaboration in non-market settings and he argues this will remain an important source of innovation even in a world of intellectual property protection and market competition.
