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Book: Where Good Ideas Come from: The Natural History of Innovation
Quotes of Book: Where Good Ideas Come from:
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  1. Steven Johnson _ Where Good Ideas Come from:

    …it is the public sector I find more interesting, because governments and other non-market institutions have long suffered from the innovation malaise of top-heavy bureaucracies. Today, these institutions have an opportunity to fundamentally alter the way they cultivate and promote good ideas. The more the government thinks of itself as an open platform instead of a centralized bureaucracy, the better it will be for all of us, citizens and activists, and entrepreneurs alike.
    book-quoteinnovation

  2. Steven Johnson _ Where Good Ideas Come from:

    Build a tangled bank.
    book-quotereminder

  3. Steven Johnson _ Where Good Ideas Come from:

    The second analog-era mechanism that encourages serendipity involves the physical limitations of the print newspaper, which forces you to pass by a collection of artfully curated stories on a variety of topics before you open up the section that most closely matches your existing passions and knowledge.
    book-quote

  4. Steven Johnson _ Where Good Ideas Come from:

    Berners-Lee was supremely lucky in the work environment he had settled into, the Swiss particle physics lab CERN. It took him ten years to nurture his slow hunch about a hypertext information platform.
    book-quoteideasinternetinnovation

  5. Steven Johnson _ Where Good Ideas Come from:

    Silicon-based life may be impossible for one other reason: silicon bonds readily dissolve in water.
    book-quote

  6. Steven Johnson _ Where Good Ideas Come from:

    Babbage had most of this system sketched out by 1837, but the first true computer to use this programmable architecture didn't appear for more than a hundred years.
    book-quoteinnovation

  7. Steven Johnson _ Where Good Ideas Come from:

    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 is being used to organize and share news about the Iranian political protests, to provide customer support for large corporations, to share interesting news items, and a thousand other applications that did not occur to the founders when they dreamed up the service in 2006. This is not just a case of cultural exaptation: people finding a new use for a tool designed to do something else. In Twitter's case, the users have been redesigning the tool itself. The convention of replying to another user with the @ symbol was spontaneously invented by the Twitter user base. Early Twitter users ported over a convention from the IRC messaging platform and began grouping a topic or event by the "hash-tag" as in "#30Rock" or "inauguration." The ability to search a live stream of tweets - which is likely to prove crucial to Twitter's ultimate business model, thanks to its advertising potential - was developed by another start-up altogether. Thanks to these innovations, following a live feed of tweets about an event - political debates or Lost episodes - has become a central part of the Twitter experience. But for the first year of Twitter's existence, that mode of interaction would have been technically impossible using Twitter. It's like inventing a toaster oven and then looking around a year later and discovering that all your customers have, on their own, figured out a way to turn it into a microwave.
    book-quote

  8. Steven Johnson _ Where Good Ideas Come from:

    When you don't have to ask for permission innovation thrives.
    book-quoteinnovationpermission

  9. Steven Johnson _ Where Good Ideas Come from:

    Legendary innovators like Franklin, Snow, and Darwin all possess some common intellectual qualities-a certain quickness of mind, unbounded curiosity-but they also share one other defining attribute. They have a lot of hobbies.
    book-quoteinnovationself-improvementhobbies

  10. Steven Johnson _ Where Good Ideas Come from:

    Good ideas may not want to be free, but they do want to connect, fuse, recombine. They want to reinvent themselves by crossing conceptual borders. They want to complete each other as much as they want to compete
    book-quoteinnovation

  11. Steven Johnson _ Where Good Ideas Come from:

    Old ideas can sometimes use new buildings. New ideas must use old buildings.
    book-quoteinsightfulinnovation

  12. Steven Johnson _ Where Good Ideas Come from:

    Being right keeps you in place. Being wrong forces you to explore.
    book-quoteinnovationgood-ideas
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