My own notes on Steven Johnson's excellent book

1. One lovely consequence of Kleiber's law is that
the number of heartbeats per lifetime tends to
be stable from species to species
http://www.flickr.com/photos/archetypefotografie/3632454965/lightbox/

2. “Great cities are not like town only larger”Jane Jacobs.The
average resident of a metropolis with a population of five
million is almost three times more creative than the
average resident of a small town
http://www.flickr.com/photos/mikebehnken/5102846536/

3. Nature's innovations rely on spare parts. Evolution
advances by taking available resources and cobbling them
together to create new uses. Our bodies are also works of
bricolage, old parts strung together to form something
radically new.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/douga/225131469/

4. Stuart Kauffman has a suggestive name for first-order
combinations: “the adjacent possible”. The strange and
beautiful truth is that its boundaries grow as you explore
those boundaries. Each new combination ushers new
combinations into the adjacent possible.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/kevenlaw/2941995444/

5. The trick is to figure out ways to
explore the edges of possibility that
surround you.

6. Innovative environments are better at
helping their inhabitants explore the
adjacent possible, because they expose a
wide and diverse sample of spare parts
(mechanical or conceptual) and they
encourage novel ways of recombining them.

7. A good idea is a network. A specific constellation of
neurons (thousands of them) fire in sync with each
other and an idea pops into consciousness. A new idea
is a network of cells exploring the adjacent possible of
connections that they can make in your mind.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/28634332@N05/4128229979/

8. An idea is not a single thing. It is more like a swarm.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/onkel_wart/4256435917

9. “Primordial soup”: an environment where novel
combinations could occur thanks to: a capacity to make
new connections with as many other elements as possible
(Carbon); and a randomising environment that encourages
collisions between all the elements in the system (H20).
http://www.flickr.com/photos/dexxus/5491134733/

10. Interconnections nurture great ideas, because most great
ideas come into the world half-baked, more hunch than
revelation. Most great ideas have the seeds of something
profound, but they lack a key element that can turn the
hunch into something truly powerful.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/ecstaticist/3503888462

11. Most hunches that turn into innovations unfold over long
time frames. Because they need so much time to develop,
they are fragile creatures, easily lost to the more pressing
needs of day-to-day issues
http://www.flickr.com/photos/nickwheeleroz/2475011402

12. Part of the secret of hunch cultivation
is simple: write everything down

13. Reading remains an unsurpassed vehicle for the
transmission of interesting new ideas and perspectives.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/nickwheeleroz/2475011402

14. If Google can give its engineers one
day a week to work on anything they
want, surely other organisations can
figure out a way to give their
employees dedicated time to immerse
themselves in a network of ideas
Marissa Mayer at Stanford University: Google's Innovation Time Off
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=soYKFWqVVzg

15. The serendipity of the Web suggest a
directive: look everything up!

16. http://www.devon-technologies.com/products/devonthink/

17. http://about.digg.com/

18. http://del.icio.us/

19. http://www.evernote.com/

22. The secret to organisational inspiration is to build
information networks that allow hunches to persist and
disperse and recombine
http://www.flickr.com/photos/paulobrandao/2788050844/

23. A paradoxical truth about innovation: good ideas
are more likely to emerge in environments that
contain a certain amount of noise and error
http://www.flickr.com/photos/pyth0ns/4667845646/

24. No parents want genetic mutations in their child. But as
species, we have been dependent on mutation
http://www.uliwestphal.110mb.com/mutatoes.html

25. The mutation rate in human germ cells is roughly one in
thirty million base pairs, which means each time parents
pass their DNA on to a child, that genetic inheritance
comes with roughly 150 mutations.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/pagedooley/2422430207

26. Big organisations like to follow perfectionist
regimes like Six Sigma and Total Quality
Management... But leaving some room for
generative error is important, too. Innovative
environments thrive on useful mistakes

27. Exaptation: an organism develops a trait optimised for a
specific use, but then the trait gets hijacked for a completely
different function. Feathers adapted for warmth, exapted for
flight.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/ac_theart/4834301008

28. In the early 1800s, a weaver named Joseph-Marie Jacquard developed
the first punch cards to weave complex solk patterns with mechanical
looms. Several decades later, Charles Babbage borrowed Jacquard's
invention to program the Analytical Engine. Punch cards would remain
crucial to programmable computers until the 1970s.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/ian-s/2152798588/

29. “All decisive events in the history of scientific thought
can be described in terms of mental cross-fertilisation
between different disciplines” Arthur Koestler

30. “The larger the town, the more
likely it is to contain in meaningful
numbers and unity, drug addicts,
radicals, intellectuals, swingers,
health-food faddists, or whatever;
and the more likely they are to
influence (as well as offend) the
conventional center of society”
Claude Fischer
http://www.flickr.com/photos/bdebaca/458957022

31. “In groups united by shared values and long-term familiarity, conformity
and convention tend to dampen any potential creative sparks. But people
who build bridges outside their islands, are able to borrow or co-opt new
ideas from external environments and put them to use in a new context”
Martin Ruef
http://www.flickr.com/photos/pcharlon/4241943716/

32. A new technology developed in one idea-space can migrate to another
idea-space through long-distance connections; in that new environment,
the technology may turn out to have unanticipated properties or may
trigger a connection that leads to a new breakthrough
http://www.flickr.com/photos/raneko/3198405581

33. Platform building is, by definition, a kind of exercise
in emergent behaviour”
http://www.flickr.com/photos/pcharlon/4241943716/

34. The Origins of GPS
http://www.gpsworld.com/gnss-system/gps-modernization/the-origins-gps-part-1-9890?page_id=2

35. Genres are the platforms and paradigms of the creative world. They are
almost never willed into existence by a single pioneering work. Genres
are built on top of moew stable conventions and technologies.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/maistora/3208077240

36. The most fascinating thing about Twitter is how much has been built on top of its
platform. When it first emerged, Twitter was widely derided as a frivolous
distraction that was mostly good for telling your friends what you had for
breakfast, Now it being used to organise and share news, route around
censorship, provide customer support, share news items and a thousand of other
applications that did not occur to the founders when they dreamed up the service.
http://www.whatisfailwhale.info/

37. “Old ideas can sometimes use new buildings.
New ideas must use old buildings” Jane Jacobs

38. http://www.calera.com/

39. http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/wealth_of_networks/Main_Page

40. The wetland created by the beaver, like the
trhiving platform created by the Twitter founders,
invites variation because it is an open platform
where resources are shared as much as they are
protected

41. Errors and myths in the book
●
“Alexander Fleming famously discovered the medical virtues
of penicilin when the mold accidentally infiltrated a culture of
Staphylococcus he had lefft by an open window...” (134)
●
“Gutenberg's printing press... the Chinese failed to adapt the
technology for the mass production of texts, in large part
because they imprinted the letterforms on the page by hand
rubbing...” (153)
●
“When Brin and Page decided to use links between Web
pages as digital votes endorsing the content of those pages,
they were exapting Berners-Lee's original design” (158)
●
“The oral contraceptive... most of critical research that led to
its development happened in the intellectual commons of
university labs at Harvard” (234)