Where Good Ideas Come From

when we look back to the original innovation engine on earth, we find two essential properties. First, a capacity to make new connections with as many other elements as possible. And, second, a “randomizing” environment that encourages collisions between all the elements in the system.

Johnson, Steven. “How Twitter Will Change the Way We Live.” Time (June 5, 2009). http://www.time.com/time/business/article/​0,8599,1902604,00.html#ixzz0mu8f4umZ.

There are many ways to measure innovation, but perhaps the most elemental yardstick, at least where technology is concerned, revolves around the job that the technology in question lets you do. All other things being equal, a breakthrough that lets you execute two jobs that were impossible before is twice as innovative as a breakthrough that lets y

The trouble with error is that we have a natural tendency to dismiss it. When Kevin Dunbar analyzed the data from his in vivo studies of microbiology labs, one of his most remarkable findings was just how many experiments produced results that were genuinely unexpected. More than half of the data collected by the researchers deviated significantly

Benkler, Yochai. The Wealth of Networks:

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

Those shared environments often take the form of a real-world public space, what the sociologist Ray Oldenburg famously called the “third place,” a connective environment distinct from the more insular world of home or office. The eighteenth-century English coffeehouse fertilized countless Enlightenment-era innovations;

A feather adapted for warmth is now exapted for flight.

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