Where Good Ideas Come From by Steven Johnson
★★★★☆ (4/5 stars)
Recommended? Strongly, especially for entrepreneurs and those seeking to better understand creativity/innovation.
This has been one of my most enjoyed reads in a while. It’s well-organized, very insightful, and immensely thought-provoking. Johnson explains his perspective on innovation in seven chapters:
- The Adjacent Possible
- Liquid Networks
- The Slow Hunch
- Serendipity
- Error
- Exaptation
- Platforms
Following these is a conclusion that examines history and offers a hypothesis on what makes for the most creativity-inspiring environment.
I found this book fascinating- its case studies include Twitter, Darwin’s theory of natural selection, Youtube, and the printing press. Johnson surely cleared up many of my misconceptions about invention: especially the “eureka!” moment we commonly associate with breakthroughs. With “The Slow Hunch”, “Serendipity”, and “Error” chapters, Johnson outlines what the invention process has typically been like: years of thinking, a lucky accident, or a mistake turned out for the better.
This book was just shy of a perfect rating because of how it recycled its examples (primarily, Darwin). While persuasive, I would have liked to see more variety in the case studies. I couldn’t find anything wrong with Johnson’s logic, but I would have liked to see more examples to further bolster his arguments. In the conclusion, he demonstrates numerous examples of innovation from history in his analysis on the environments most friendly to “good ideas”. I would have liked to see him go more in depth in some of these.
Something that should be noted is how this book drew me in. Before I had finished the first paragraph of the Kindle sample, I was immediately engaged and ready to read the entire book. In fact, this book motivated me to drop the book I was halfway through and pick it up immediately. Johnson writes with a captivating style, but I felt like the book’s allure simmered towards the end.
Johnson is definitely an expert in the science of innovation, and I learned a substantial amount about fostering good ideas from this book. Now to see if I can come up with some good ideas.
