In his book Where Good Ideas Come From, author and researcher Steven Johnson introduced a term he borrowed from evolutionary biology: the adjacent possible. According to Johnson, “The adjacent possible is a kind of shadow future, hovering on the edges of the present state of things, a map of all the ways in which the present can reinvent itself… Wh

Steven Johnson’s book Where Good Ideas Come From advances what we could call a network theory of human achievement, one that has its best metaphor in ecology, the constant interdependence of many unseen forces that “compulsively connect and remix that most valuable of resources: information.”

The next big ideas in any field are found right beyond the current cutting edge, in the adjacent space that contains the possible new combinations of existing ideas. The reason important discoveries often happen multiple times, therefore, is that they only become possible once they enter the adjacent possible, at which point anyone surveying this s