Where Good Ideas Come From

This is what Stuart Kauffman recognized when he first formulated the idea of the adjacent possible: that there is something like an essential drive in the biosphere to diversify into new ways of making a living.

DEVONthink features a clever algorithm that detects subtle semantic connections between distinct passages of text. These tools are smart enough to get around the classic search-engine failing of excessive specificity: searching for “dog” and missing all the articles that only have the word “canine” in them.

Good ideas are not conjured out of thin air; they are built out of a collection of existing parts, the composition of which expands (and, occasionally, contracts) over time.

You give the hunch enough nourishment to keep it growing, and plant it in fertile soil, where its roots can make new connections. And then you give it time to bloom.

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

The history of being spectacularly right has a shadow history lurking behind it: a much longer history of being spectacularly wrong, again and again.

A new idea is something larger than that: it’s a new perspective on a problem, or a recognition of a new opportunity that has gone unexplored to date.

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 other organizational technique for facilitating serendipitous connections is the “brainstorm” session,