Good Morning,
This is the second part of my summary of Where Good Ideas Come From. Read Part 1 here.
4. Serendipity
For a hunch to become something more, it has to connect with new ideas. How can we change our environment to foster serendipitous connections?
For many years the nature of neural connections was debated. Are they chemical reactions or electrical signals? Scientist Otto Loewi designed a simple experiment using two frog hearts. He slowed one heart down with electric signals, then gathered the fluids around it and poured them over the other heart. The second heart slowed down as well. Thus Loewi proved that nerve communication is electrochemical in nature. Here is how he described his process for developing the experiment:
“The night before Easter Sunday of that year I awoke, turned on the light, and jotted down a few notes on a tiny slip of thin paper. Then I fell asleep again. It occurred to me at six o'clock in the morning that during the night I had written down something most important, but I was unable to decipher the scrawl. The next night, at three o'clock, the idea returned. It was the design of an experiment to determine whether or not the hypothesis of chemical transmission that I had uttered seventeen years ago was correct. I got up immediately, went to the laboratory, and performed a simple experiment on a frog heart according to the nocturnal design.”
The idea came to him in a dream. Loewi’s dream was the serendipitous catalyst for a slow hunch he had for 17 years. Dreams are just one of many ways through which serendipity can strike and form connections.
Novelist John Barth said:
"You don't reach Serendip by plotting a course for it. You have to set out in good faith for elsewhere and lose your bearings serendipitously."
To include serendipity in your environment is a difficult endeavor because it seems counterintuitive. But there are many ways one can foster it, such as going for walks or meditating.
Another key to making connections is taking in more information. Bill Gates is famous for taking reading vacations. He spends the year making a list of books to read (on various different topics), then takes a week or two to spend all his time reading.
Consuming all this different knowledge in a short amount of time must increase the likelihood of a serendipitous connection.
5. Error
When working on a slow hunch, one might accidentally come across a great idea through serendipity. But what if the entire idea is an accident?
In 1951, electrical engineer Wilson Greatbatch was working at an animal behavior farm, attaching devices to animals to measure biometric (heart rate, blood pressure etc.). One day during lunch he got into a conversation with two surgeons who were discussing irregular heartbeats. Something about the conversation reminded Greatbatch of his days as a teenager when he built his own shortwave radio. He thought about the heart as a radio which was failing to receive signals properly. Years later, he was helping a physician build a device which would measure heartbeats. Due to a mistake he made, the device instead began to mimic the rhythm of a human heartbeat. His mind flashed to the conversation he had years ago on the farm. Within the next two years he refined and created the first cardiac pacemaker.
Science and Engineering are filled with examples of accidental discoveries. Penicillin was discovered accidentally when mold formed in Alexander Fleming’s petri dishes. The Nobel prize winners who first discovered remnants of the big bang, thought their telescope was broken.
Charlan Nemeth studied the relationship between noise, dissent and creativity in group environments. The experiment involved asking open ended questions about what words people associate to colors. She observed the ideas groups had naturally first. Then she would add error into the mix by having actors blurt out clearly unorthodox answers in group experiments. This led to more creative thought from the rest of the group. She found that good ideas are more likely to emerge in environments with a certain level of error and noise.
Environments rich with information flow and serendipity may also need a small margin of error to allow for potential accidental innovations.
6. Exaptation
Exaptation is when a feature which was originally developed for one purpose is used for another. An example is when dinosaurs grew feathers as an evolutionary trait for warmth, but they began to serve a purpose for flight.
By the mid 1400s, the Rhineland region in Germany was filled with vineyards producing wine. They made use of the screw press, a centuries old device which efficiently pressed grapes. Johannes Gutenberg was a tinkerer with an interest in the screw press, but not wine making. Previously, using his training as a goldsmith, Gutenberg was able to make effective modifications to the moveable type system. Now, after spending time studying the screw press, he was able to combine the two technologies to create one of the most important inventions of history, the printing press.
The brilliance of Gutenberg’s design comes not only from the influence of the printing press, but the fact that he didn’t create the screw press nor the moveable type system. He exapted the existing two machines (which he understood very well) and created a device which had a tremendous benefit to the modern world.
Sociologist Claude Fischer investigated the social effects of living in a big city. His primary finding was that cities nourish subcultures much better than small towns and suburbs. Cities make it easier to find like-minded people, and promote the growth of a field of interest.
The second key element of a dense urban area is collisions. Cities also make it more likely for these different subcultures to interact. These collisions make the environment rich with exaptation.
A good example of an exaptation rich environment is the inside of one of the world’s most creative companies: Apple. Typically in a company, products are developed in a linear fashion, first design, engineering, manufacturing and then sales. Each step of the way, one group or team does their entire job, completely isolated from the others, then send their work off to the next department. At Apple, they employ more of a coffeehouse model, where all groups meet continuously throughout the development process. This approach is messier, and more chaotic than a linear development cycle, but it allows for collisions, and more exaptation from a diverse group of people.
Introducing interactions with different fields of interest adds exaptation to an environment, expanding the adjacent possible
7. Platforms
The final pattern in the formation of great ideas is open platforms. These are ideas and technologies which are available for other innovative thinkers to build their new ideas upon.
Twitter is one of the largest platforms on the web today. Much like the founders of YouTube, Twitter’s developers greatly benefited from existing platforms. The initial idea was based on displaying an SMS messages as a ‘status update’. This is where the original 140 character limit came from.
The beauty of early Twitter wasn’t a plethora of features, but the lack thereof. It was a simple open platform, which the users could make their own. Both the # hashtag and @ tagging features were first invented by the user base, not the developers.
One major aspect of twitter’s early growth was their API. A system that other developers could use to create apps based on the content from twitter. Many companies keep their product closed off, but Twitter had their API running from a very early stage. This allowed people to create mobile apps for the platform before the company’s own developers did. The openness of a platform lends itself to outside creativity, which can thereby increase the value of the platform.
In 2008, Vivek Kundra — Chief Technology Officer for Washington, D.C — created the Apps for Democracy program. The program made a lot of city government data public, and called on developers to build applications which used the open data. The winning apps were given $10,000 prizes. Developer sent in tons of brilliant solutions such as parking information apps, guides for bikers, and digital walking tours. Normally it would cost the government over $2 million to get these solutions. By comparison, the Apps for Democracy program costed them only $50,000.
Leveraging open platforms is a great way to explore innovative ideas. Making a platform open to others allows the utilization of outsider creativity.
Conclusion: The Fourth Quadrant
Johnson ends the book off with a discussion of breakthrough innovations, and where they fit in terms of the patterns he observed. He splits the ideas into 4 quadrants:
Innovations that came from a small team, or a single inventor are Individual. Ideas formed by collective and distributed groups working on the same problem are classified as Networked.
Market innovations are those which were intended for sale and licensed by the inventor. Those who did not innovate for profit and let their ideas flow freely to the world, are considered Non-market.
Johnson categorized innovations throughout history into these quadrants, as seen below.
We can derive two major insights from this information. For one, it’s clear that most innovations come from non-market endeavors. But what changes over time is how those innovations happen. Initially many ideas were formed by individuals, isolated from larger networks. Perhaps this was due to the lack of methods by which one could communicate their ideas with the world. In the most recent centuries, most innovations have come from networked groups.
This sets an interesting precedent for what we can accomplish with the growth of communication on the internet today.
Innovation might be spontaneous and difficult to force out, but there are ways to develop an environment that nurtures creativity. The more we build that environment, perhaps the better we become at having good ideas.
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Thanks for reading,
Sid