∎ Where Good Ideas Come From- The Natural History of Innovation - Johnson - 2011 - Reading Session 202408121210

Last updated Aug 12, 2024 | Originally published Aug 12, 2024

Annotations of 𖠫 Where Good Ideas Come From- The Natural History of Innovation - Johnson - 2011 from 20240812 at 12:10

One way to do this is to create an open database of hunches, the Web 2.0 version of the traditional suggestion box. A public hunch database makes every passing idea visible to everyone else in the organization, not just management. Other employees can comment or expand on those ideas, connecting them with their own hunches about new products or priorities

Crowdsolving platforms are a modern version of this, but I’m not sure it’s proving the utility of the concept.

Page 128

Johnson concludes with two vaguely-described mechanisms for organizational serendipity: (1) a semantic similarity index of all the work everyone is doing, so that efforts on one project might show up to another tangentially-related but organizationally-distinct project; and (2) a crowdsolving platform for ideas. These are regrettably kind of weak. We now know much more about serendipity and its enablers and inhibitors, and they go far beyond this kind of shallow platform-based solution: instead they address culture and power.

Page 221

for the sake of clarity, let’s not blur the line between “individual” and “network” by admitting to the discussion the prior innovations that inspired or supported the new generation of ideas. Yes, it is important that Gutenberg borrowed the screw-press technology from the winemakers, but one cannot say that the print ing press was a collective innovation the way, for example, the In ternet clearly was. So Gutenberg and Berners-Lee get classified on the individual side of the spectrum.

I don’t think I agree with this scoping of the data. It’s an asystemic approach — it requires a belief that later innovations can be separated from earlier ones, and it (perhaps more problematically) hero-worships the supposed inventors. This does not necessarily agree with e.g., ontological design, in which “good moves in design space” will likely be filled by some actor because of the needs and niches of the ecosystem.

Page 231

Why have so many good ideas flourished in the fourth quad rant, despite the lack of economic incentives?

Another important piece missing from this analysis is the choice of “most significant inventions.” This relates to my earlier criticism: the this view of the primacy and separability of a given invention erases all of the little requisite innovations that were necessary to unlock one of these “major” innovations to be possible. This view is a bit reductive, then, because it fails to account for the feedback loops between innovations big and small.

Page 232

That deliberate inefficiency doesn’t exist in the fourth quad rant. No, these non-market, decentralized environments do not have immense paydays to motivate their participants. But their openness creates other, powerful opportunities for good ideas to flourish.

It seems strange to conduct this analysis without considering the other motivating incentives that exist for these innovators/innovations. Many of the innovations listed are the work of scholars — and sure, maybe they weren’t trying to invent some doohickey for a patent that will give them a lifetime of royalties, but they needed to publish good ideas to be considered a prestigious scholar. It would be interesting to take this same analytical approach but consider this and other kinds of incentives as well.

Page 241

If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruc tion of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessen ing their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of con finement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property.

Page 246

The patterns are simple, but followed together, they make for a whole that is wiser than the sum of its parts. Go for a walk; cultivate hunches; write everything down, but keep your folders messy; embrace serendipity; make generative mistakes; take on multiple hobbies; frequent coffeehouses and other liquid networks; follow the links; let others build on your ideas; borrow, recycle, re invent. Build a tangled bank.

It is remarkably telling that in this sentence — Johnson’s concluding call-to-action of this book — his advice for facilitating serendipity is simply to embrace it.

It’s clear that we don’t know how to do this, yet. Not really.