Summary: With Where Good Ideas Come From, Steven Johnson pairs the insight of his bestselling Everything Bad Is Good for You and the dazzling erudition of The Ghost Map and The Invention of Air to address an urgent and universal question: What sparks the flash of brilliance? How does groundbreaking innovation happen? Answering in his infectious, culturally omnivorous style, using his fluency in fields from neurobiology to popular culture, Johnson provides the complete, exciting, and encouraging story of how we generate the ideas that push our careers, our lives, our society, and our culture forward. Beginning with Charles Darwin's first encounter with the teeming ecosystem of the coral reef and drawing connections to the intellectual hyperproductivity of modern megacities and to the instant success of YouTube, Johnson shows us that the question we need to ask is, What kind of environment fosters the development of good ideas? His answers are never less than revelatory, convincing, and inspiring as Johnson identifies the seven key principles to the genesis of such ideas, and traces them across time and disciplines.
Most exhilarating is Johnson's conclusion that with today's tools and environment, radical innovation is extraordinarily accessible to those who know how to cultivate it. Where Good Ideas Come From is essential reading for anyone who wants to know how to come up with tomorrow's great ideas.
Review: An enjoyable read that combines natural history, technology, and science to explain how ideas either succeed or fail.
This book wasn't exactly what I expected. The summary and title is a tad misleading. Johnson does not provide "the complete, exciting, and encouraging story of how we generate the ideas that push our careers, our lives, our society, and our culture forward." Instead of focusing on a handful of ideas and providing the seven key principles that brought about each of those ideas, Johnson dedicates a chapter to each key principle and provides a few examples for each idea. It is a bit unnatural to divide the key principles up since they can overlap and can be more or less important to an idea.
Rating:
Recommendation: I would recommend this book to anyone interested in innovation and/or someone interested in the development and history of technology. This book might be a little too in depth for someone with a casual interest in the subject.
This book wasn't exactly what I expected. The summary and title is a tad misleading. Johnson does not provide "the complete, exciting, and encouraging story of how we generate the ideas that push our careers, our lives, our society, and our culture forward." Instead of focusing on a handful of ideas and providing the seven key principles that brought about each of those ideas, Johnson dedicates a chapter to each key principle and provides a few examples for each idea. It is a bit unnatural to divide the key principles up since they can overlap and can be more or less important to an idea.
I did enjoy learning about the stories of how ideas and innovations came about. It makes sense that they don't come from a vacuum and it was crazy to see how some ideas ideas and innovations may have never come about if one or two things would have been different. I had hoped to learn about how more ideas came to be, but Johnson kept using the same stories over and over again. My favorite aspect of this book is how ideas are created and developed in the natural world. Animals, plants, and bacteria are really quite smart when it comes to creating and implementing ideas.
Rating:
Recommendation: I would recommend this book to anyone interested in innovation and/or someone interested in the development and history of technology. This book might be a little too in depth for someone with a casual interest in the subject.
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