Where Good Ideas Come From

Jacobs, Jane. The Nature of Economies. New York: Modern Library, 2000.

Something about the environment of a big city was making its residents significantly more innovative than residents of smaller towns. But what was it?

Ronald Burt’s analysis of social networks and organizational innovation, see his “Social Contagion and Innovation” and Social Origins of Good Ideas.

Hall, Doug. “Fail Fast, Fail Cheap.” BusinessWeek (June 25, 2007). http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/​content/07_26/b4040436.htm_.

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

Waldrop, Mitchell M. Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992.

Prestero, Timothy. “Better by Design: How Empathy Can Lead to More Successful Technologies and Services for the Poor (Discussion of Design Case Narratives: Rickshaw Bank, Solar-Powered Tuki, FGN Pump).” Innovations: Technology, Governance, Globalization 5, no. 1 (2010): 79–93.

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 m

Bigger animals just

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