Steven Johnson: Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation

Johnson--writer, Web guru, and bestselling author of Everything Bad Is Good for You--delivers a sweeping look at innovation spanning nearly the whole of human history. What sparks our great ideas? Johnson breaks down the cultural, biological, and environmental fuel into seven broad "patterns," each packed with diverse, at times almost disjointed anecdotes that Johnson synthesizes into a recipe for success. A section on "slow hunches" captivates, taking readers from the FBI's work on 9/11 to Google's development of Google News. A section on error takes us through a litany of accidental innovations, including the one that eventually led to the invention of the computer. "Being right keeps you in place," Johnson reminds us. "eing wrong forces us to explore." It's eye-opening stuff--although it does require an investment from the reader. But as fans of the author's previous work know, an investment in Johnson pays off, and those who stick with the author as he meanders through an occasional intellectual digression will come away enlightened and entertained, and with something perhaps even more useful--how to recognize the conditions that could spark their own creativity and innovation. Another mind-opening work from the author of Mind Wide Open.





The figure of the lone genius may captivate us, but we intuit that such geniuses’ creations don’t materialize in a vacuum. Johnson supported the intuition in his biography of eighteenth-century scientist Joseph Priestly (The Invention of Air, 2009) and here explores it from different angles using sets of anecdotes from science and art that underscore some social or informational interaction by an inventor or artist. Assuring readers that he is not engaged in “intellectual tourism,” Johnson recurs to the real-world effects of individuals and organizations operating in a fertile information environment. Citing the development of the Internet and its profusion of applications such as Twitter, the author ascribes its success to “exaptation” and “stacked platforms.” By which he means that curious people used extant stuff or ideas to produce a new bricolage and did so because of their immersion in open networks. With his own lively application of stories about Darwin’s theory of atolls, the failure to thwart 9/11, and musician Miles Davis, Johnson connects with readers promoting hunches and serendipity in themselves and their organizations.



Steven Berlin Johnson (born June 6, 1968) is an American popular science author. Steven Johnson has graduate degrees from Columbia University in English literature, and as an undergraduate studied semiotics at Brown University, which is a part of its modern culture and media department. Steven Johnson has worked as a columnist for magazines such as Discover Magazine, Slate, and Wired. He co-founded the early webzine Feed Magazine in 1995, and the Webby-award-winning news discussion site Plastic.com in 2001. He is a Distinguished Writer in Residence at New York University. He is the author of the best selling book, Everything Bad is Good for You: How Today's Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter (2005), which argues that over the last three decades popular culture artifacts (like television dramas and video games) have become increasingly complex and have helped to foster higher-order thinking skills. On March 5, 2009, he appeared on The Colbert Report to promote his new book, The Invention of Air. In 2006, he announced a new online service, Outside.in, which he described as "an attempt to collectively build the geographic Web, neighborhood by neighborhood". Steven Johnson is married and has three sons. He lives with his family in Brooklyn.

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Where Good Ideas Come From from KQED's Forum by forum@kqed.org (KQED Public Radio)

The book "Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation" explores why certain environments seem to disproportionately spark the generation and sharing of good ideas. Author Steven Johnson joins us.

Download the full mp3 podcast here. See also: Where Good Ideas Come from: A Natural History of Innovation

An Interview with Steven Johnson from Seattlest by Regis Lacher

Science writer Steven Johnson has made a career of challenging the interactions between people and their environment. His 2005 book, Everything Bad is Good for You, examined the received wisdom of the harm of popular culture. The Ghost Map examined the changes of cities through the lens of London’s worst cholera outbreak. In his newest book, Where Good Ideas Come From, Johnson undertakes the bold goal of determining why some places allow good ideas and others quash them. Using both natural and cultural systems, Johnson relates stories that both challenge and expand our ideas about genius, innovation, and creativity.

Read the full interview here.

10/05/10 Marketplace Tech Report from APM: Future Tense

Here's a thought: What if all that time you waste on social networking websites isn't a waste of time at all? What if tweeting your tweets on Twitter and facebooking with your fake friends on Facebook is actually a path toward finding the next big idea, the next breakthrough A-ha(!) moment of your life? We talk to author Steven Johnson. His new book Where Good Ideas Come From argues that we may be more likely to have our breakthrough on social networks than sitting alone at a desk.

Listen to the podcast here.