Where Good Ideas Come From

Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly. Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention. New York: HarperPerennial, 1997. ―――. Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. New York: HarperPerennial, 1991.

But scientists believe that the sudden adoption of sex is also a kind of biological innovation strategy: in challenging times, an organism needs new ideas to meet those new challenges.

There is a prediction (albeit retroactive) lurking in this idea of the liquid network, as well as in the premise that innovative environments share signature patterns at different scales. The prediction is that whenever human beings first organized themselves into settlements that resembled liquid networks, a great flowering of innovation would hav

Voyage of the Beagle,

The platform builders and ecosystem engineers do not just open a door in the adjacent possible. They build an entire new floor.

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

Benkler, Yochai. The Wealth of Networks:

the history of cultural progress is, almost without exception, a story of one door leading to another door, exploring the palace one room at a time.

innovation thrives in discarded spaces. Emergent platforms derive much of their creativity from the inventive and economical reuse of existing resources, and, as any urbanite will tell you, the most expensive resource in a big city is real estate.

Gleick, James. Chaos: Making a New Science. New York: Penguin Books, 1987.