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Steven Johnson

Where Good Ideas Come From: The Seven Patterns of Innovation Unknown Binding – 29 Sept. 2011

by Steven Johnson (Author)

4.4 1,356 ratings

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From the author of Emergence and The Ghost Map, Steven Johnson's Where Good Ideas Come From: The Seven Patterns of Innovation identifies key principles that are the driving force of creativity.

Learn how:

A slow hunch can be much more valuable than a Eureka moment
The connected 'hive mind' is smarter than the lone thinker
Where you think matters just as much as what you're thinking
The best ideas come from building on the ideas and inventions of others

From the Renaissance to satellites, medical breakthroughs to social media, Charles Darwin to Marconi, Steven Johnson shows how, by recognising where and how patterns of creativity occur, we can all discover the secrets of inspiration.

'Inspirational' - Independent

'Exhilarating ... An entirely new way of looking at almost everything' - Guardian

'A huge diversity of bright ideas' - Financial Times

'Johnson finds new and original things to say about the nature of innovation, and the different forms it can take' - Economist, Books of the Year

'An enthralling work full of counter-intuitive insights' - Daily Mail

Steven Johnson is the author of the acclaimed books Everything Bad is Good for You, Mind Wide Open, Emergence and Interface Culture. His writing appeared in the Guardian, the New Yorker, Nation and Harper's, as well as the op-ed pages of The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. He is a Distinguished Writer In Residence at NYU's School Of Journalism, and a Contributing Editor to Wired.

Print length

336 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Penguin
Publication date

29 Sept. 2011
Dimensions

12.9 x 1.9 x 19.8 cm
ISBN-10

0141033401
ISBN-13

978-0141033402
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Product description

Review

Stimulating and insightful ... a huge diversity of bright ideas ― Financial Times

Johnson develops his provocative thesis in a book that is lucid and ... brilliant. ― New Scientist

[An] exhilarating, idea-thirsty book ... full of intriguing facts. ― Sunday Times

About the Author

Steven Johnson is the US bestselling author of Where Good Ideas Come From, Future Perfect, The Invention of Air, The Ghost Map, and Everything Bad Is Good for You. He is the founder of a variety of influential websites and has written for Time, Wired, The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Penguin (29 Sept. 2011)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Unknown Binding ‏ : ‎ 336 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0141033401
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0141033402
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 12.9 x 1.9 x 19.8 cm

Best Sellers Rank: 313,834 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- 130 in Knowledge Management
- 271 in Operational Productivity
- 365 in Business Creativity Skills

Customer reviews:
4.4 1,356 ratings

About the author

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Steven Johnson

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Steven Johnson is the best-selling author of seven books on the intersection of science, technology and personal experience. His writings have influenced everything from the way political campaigns use the Internet, to cutting-edge ideas in urban planning, to the battle against 21st-century terrorism. In 2010, he was chosen by Prospect magazine as one of the Top Ten Brains of the Digital Future.

His latest book, Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation, was a finalist for the 800CEORead award for best business book of 2010, and was ranked as one of the year’s best books by The Economist. His book The Ghost Map was one of the ten best nonfiction books of 2006 according to Entertainment Weekly. His books have been translated into more than a dozen languages.

Steven has also co-created three influential web sites: the pioneering online magazine FEED, the Webby-Award-winning community site, Plastic.com, and most recently the hyperlocal media site outside.in, which was acquired by AOL in 2011. He serves on the advisory boards of a number of Internet-related companies, including Meetup.com, Betaworks, and Nerve.

Steven is a contributing editor to Wired magazine and is the 2009 Hearst New Media Professional-in-Residence at The Journalism School, Columbia University. He won the Newhouse School fourth annual Mirror Awards for his TIME magazine cover article titled "How Twitter Will Change the Way We Live." Steven has also written for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Nation, and many other periodicals. He has appeared on many high-profile television programs, including The Charlie Rose Show, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, and The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer. He lectures widely on technological, scientific, and cultural issues. He blogs at stevenberlinjohnson.com and is @stevenbjohnson on Twitter. He lives in Marin County, California with his wife and three sons.

Customer reviews

4.4 out of 5

1,356 global ratings

5 star		58%
4 star		27%
3 star		10%
2 star		3%
1 star		2%

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Top reviews from United Kingdom

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Interesting, if a little (and deceptively) short

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 16 January 2011

Verified Purchase

I enjoyed this book - it provides further evidence against the idea that creativity is something that happens to lone individuals in a flash, something that is annoyingly peddled in many books and institutions, especially art colleges where students are encouraged to sit alone, waiting for inspiration to strike.
The truth is, good ideas come from the clash of knowledge and speculation that occurs when people from different backgrounds get together and talk. The coffee shops of the Enlightenment provide a good example of this, but more recent instances of serendipitous conversations between people from medicine and electronics, to take just one example, lead to the innovations we take for granted today.
This is a salutory lesson for governments (or the present British govt in particular) which is seeking to force universities to specialise in "economically beneficial" subjects such as science, maths and engineering, without understanding that economic benefit stems both from the mixture of all those disciplines and the arts and humanities and, more importantly, usually from ideas and discoveries made just for the sheer hell of it. People who begin researching a specific question with a clear economic advantage don't seem half as productive as those who pursue one simply because it is interesting. The latter group of people often find things out that are combined with other ideas to produce something advantageous.
The lesson of this book is that good ideas come from accidental collisions of thinking that derives from the sheer joy of thinking. The idea that universities should abandon thinking for the hell of it in favour of serving the economy is a short road to nowhere.

My only real complaint with the book is that half of it is taken up with short descriptions of famous discoveries. These are interesting, but I couldn't help but feel cheated. The book really should have gone in to education and government policy, and suggested ways in which the two could permit great ideas to foster. Without these it is merely a collection of interesting stories and half-developed ideas. But that notwithstanding, it provides a lot of food for thought and is well worth purchasing and reading. It is easy to follow, and thought-provoking. If you thought good ideas came in flashes of lightning, you'll soon change your mind. Start hanging out with people from different areas, not with people you share common interests. Who knows, you might end up coming up with a few good ideas yourself.

8 people found this helpful

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M. Hillmann

Chance favours the connected mind

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 15 November 2010

Verified Purchase

The common image of the individual operating alone in the laboratory dreaming up brilliant flashes of inspiration is countered by Johnson with the argument that ideas are generated by crowds where connection is more important than protection.

Steven Johnson's technique is the personalisation of his theme, drawing unexpected conclusions from the personal story and then weaving it into the next story. For example he brings to life through stories his assertion that good ideas are built on previous work and depend upon the variety of other stimuli around them. He recounts how in the late 1870's a Parisian obstetrician named Stephane Tarnier took a day off from his work at Maternite de Paris and paid a visit to the nearby Paris Zoo where chicken eggs were being incubated. It gave Tarnier the inspiration to develop incubation for babies leading to a medical advance that rivals any more well known innovations, such as radiation therapy or double heart bypass, in terms of giving humans longer life. Then follows the sequel about Timothy Prestero, an MIT professor who visited the Indonesian city of Meulaboh after the 2004 Indian Tsunami. He discovered that eight baby incubators, donated by a range of international organisations, were broken down through lack of spare parts. Prestoro and his team decided to build an incubator out of car parts that were abundant in the developing world - an idea that had originated with a Boston doctor named Jonathon Rosen. From this Johnson asserts that good ideas develop like this NeoNurture incubator. "The trick to having good ideas is not to sit around in glorious isolation and try to think big thoughts. The trick is to get more parts on the table."

The astounding detail in this short paragraph brings a richness to his arguments about the generation of ideas.

Johnson counters the colloquial description of good ideas as sparks, flashes or eureka moments and likens them to networks. For new ideas the sheer size of network is needed and it needs to be plastic - capable of reconfiguration. Innovation thrives on a wide pool of minds. The eureka moment is usually preceded by the slow hunch like Darwin's theory of evolution that developed over many years.

Johnson extols the power of accidental connections or serendipity in the recognition of the significance of the new ideas. Innovation prospers when ideas can be serendiptiously connected and recombined with other ideas, when hunches can stumble across other hunches. Walls dividing ideas such as patents, trade secrets and proprietary technology inhibit serendipidy. Open environments are more conducive to innovation than closed.

Error which creates a path that leads you out of your comfort zone and exaptation , which are traits optimised for a specific use getting hijacked for a completely different use (birds feathers evolved for warmth proving useful for flying) are key paths to innovation. The history of the world wide web designed for the academic environment now used for shopping, sharing photos and Google.

Johnson classifies sources of key innovations from 1400 to the present day according to whether they were driven by the individual or a network and whether they were market driven or non market. He concludes that non market, open platform networked approach is now far more prolific. Witness Google, Twitter, Amazon.

Powerful , often controversial but immensely readable. The appendix alone describing the key innovations from 1400 to now is a fascinating read.

30 people found this helpful

Helpful

E. Lenderking

Why this is one of the best books out there on Innovation

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 18 November 2011

Verified Purchase

The subject of innovation is one of the great hot current cults in business and management thinking, so what good a new book on such a well trodden patch?

Steven Johnson comes at the subject with his usual clarity, penchant for clear structure in his thinking, and almost total avoidance of jargon. This is a great advantage when comparing this book to any of the hundreds of titles on the subject written by business gurus, business school professors, etc. What results is a lucid, very readable, in depth analysis of the process of innovation.

I also found this book particularly valuable because the framework Mr. Johnson lays out lends itself beautifully to practical application.

Finally, the stories and illustrations the author uses to support his thesis are not the usual stories that one reads in books of this kind--in other words not the well trodden cases. When he does refer to histories that we all know, his emphasis and focus is fresh and aspects of the story that we might not have known, so the effect is convincing, and also entertaining.

This book goes down easy, which is an absolute rarity for one dealing with such a complex subject. I can't think of a more stimulating book I have ever read on the subject of strategy, innovation, business, etc. A must read.

8 people found this helpful

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