Where Good Ideas Come From

Government bureaucracies have a long and richly deserved reputation for squelching innovation, but they possess four key elements that may allow them to benefit from the innovation engine of an emergent platform. First, they are repositories of a vast amount of information and services that could be of potential value to ordinary people, if only we

The idea was too powerful not to spill over into other nearby minds.

What kind of environment creates good ideas? The simplest way to answer it is this: innovative environments are better at helping their inhabitants explore the adjacent possible, because they expose a wide and diverse sample of spare parts—mechanical or conceptual—and they encourage novel ways of recombining those parts. Environments that block or

In its most customary form, “commonplacing,” as it was called, involved transcribing interesting or inspirational passages from one’s reading, assembling a personalized encyclopedia of quotations. There is a distinct self-help quality to the early descriptions of commonplacing’s virtues: maintaining the books enabled one to “lay up a fund of knowle

because by embracing these patterns we can build environments that do a better job of nurturing good ideas, whether those environments are schools, governments, software platforms, poetry seminars, or social movements.

This is how slow hunches often mature: by stealth, in small steps. They fade into view.

Exploring the adjacent possible can be as simple as opening a door. But sometimes you need to move a wall.

The argument of this book is that a series of shared properties and patterns recur again and again in unusually fertile environments.

took a similar time frame to go from innovation to mass adoption.