Where Good Ideas Come From

In Darwin’s language, the open connections of the tangled bank have been just as generative as the war of nature. Stephen Jay Gould makes this point powerfully in the allegory of his sandal collection: “The wedge of competition has been, ever since Darwin, the canonical argument for progress in normal times,” he writes. “But I will claim that the w

Ideas rise in crowds, as Poincaré said. They rise in liquid networks where connection is valued more than protection. So if we want to build environments that generate good ideas—whether those environments are in schools or corporations or governments or our own personal lives—we need to keep that history in mind, and not fall back on the easy assu

You may not be able to turn your government into a coral reef, but you can create comparable environments on the scale of everyday life: in the workplaces you inhabit; in the way you consume media; in the way you augment your memory. The patterns are simple, but followed together, they make for a whole that is wiser than the sum of its parts. Go fo

Amar Bhidé’s Venturesome Economy. And many of our clichés about

Gleick’s Chaos and Kevin Kelly’s Out of Control.

Jaron Lanier’s critique of the “hive mind” appears in his book You Are Not a Gadget,

Good ideas are like the NeoNurture device. They are, inevitably, constrained by the parts and skills that surround them. 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 work

Yochai Benkler includes a more complex chart of potential innovation frameworks in Wealth of Networks.

How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006.

Illuminating accounts of his work appear in both James