Steven Johnson investigated the types of environment that nourish fledgeling innovations, and presented his analysis in “Where Good Ideas Come From”. In his conclusions he explores the available data on about 200 of the most important good ideas of the past 600 years and derives some insightful advice for fostering innovation in the 21st century.
What makes innovation flourish? Which types of environment let new ideas thrive? Science author Steven Johnson delves into exactly these questions in “Where Good Ideas Come From”. Here’s what he found.
As innovators, we build our future progress on our predecessors’ past achievements thanks to humankind’s unique capability of social learning, of sharing experiences and ideas. Today, we rely heavily on computers, databases, and the internet to facilitate and accelerate whatever we do. And that includes our social learning capabilities and our creative skills. Hence it’s high time to critically assess technology’s impact and to formulate our expectations: How do we employ technology to support our innovative endeavours? What do we demand? And what can we realistically hope for?
We have everything today that we need to shape tomorrow. All the ingredients for our future are available to us in the here and now. That is the very essence of progress: the future flows from the past, we shape it on the foundation of the past. We “only” need to find out how we can best combine the available ingredients to get the next task done. That’s what we call progress. And we can make progress in different ways …
Innovation deepens our knowledge and understanding of the world, it extends our reach and access to resources. More importantly, innovation expands the realm of what we can do with all our knowledge and resources: deliver new goods and products, bring forward new types of organisations and services, and in more general terms develop new ideas … Continue reading Exploring the adjacent possible – The origin of good ideas
understanding innovation 