Where Good Ideas Come From
Kleiber discovered that this scaling phenomenon stuck to an unvarying mathematical script called “negative quarter-power scaling.” If you plotted mass versus metabolism on a logarithmic grid, the result was a perfectly straight line that led from rats and pigeons all the way up to bulls and hippopotami.
metabolism scales to mass to the negative quarter power.
one lovely consequence of Kleiber’s law is that the number of heartbeats per lifetime tends to be stable from species to species. Bigger animals just take longer to use up their quota.
West and his team were delighted to discover that Kleiber’s negative quarter-power scaling governed the energy and transportation growth of city living. The number of gasoline stations, gasoline sales, road surface area, the length of electrical cables: all these factors follow the exact same power law that governs the speed with which energy is expended in biological organisms.
But there was one fundamental difference: the quarter-power law governing innovation was positive, not negative. A city that was ten times larger than its neighbor wasn’t ten times more innovative; it was seventeen times more innovative. A metropolis fifty times bigger than a town was 130 times more innovative.
“To concentrate so much color information within the frame of a small screen,” the Times wrote, “would be difficult for even the most gifted artist doing a ‘still’ painting. To do it with constantly moving pictures seemed pure wizardry.”
one-to-many communications clock in at the same social innovation rate with an eerie regularity. Call it the 10/10 rule: a decade to build the new platform, and a decade for it to find a mass audience.
The argument of this book is that a series of shared properties and patterns recur again and again in unusually fertile environments.
The Meulaboh incubators were a representative sample: some studies suggest that as much as 95 percent of medical technology donated to developing countries breaks within the first five years of use.
Building the NeoNurture out of car parts was doubly efficient, because it tapped both the local supply of parts themselves and the local knowledge of automobile repair. These were both abundant resources in the developing world context, as Rosen liked to say.
But markets should not be exclusively defined in terms of the profit motive. Consider the invention of one of capitalism’s key conceptual tools: double-entry accounting, which Goethe called one of the “finest inventions of the human mind.” Now the cornerstone of all financial bookkeeping, double-entry’s innovation of recording every financial event in two ledgers (one reflecting a debit, the other a credit) allowed merchants to track the financial health of their businesses with unparalleled accuracy.
Dunbar’s research suggests one vaguely reassuring thought: even with all the advanced technology of a leading molecular biology lab, the most productive tool for generating good ideas remains a circle of humans at a table, talking shop.
A better model might be MIT’s legendary Building 20, the temporary structure built during World War II that somehow managed to last fifty-five years, in part because it had an extraordinary track record for cultivating both breakthrough ideas and organizations like Noam Chomsky’s linguistics department, Bose Acoustics, and the Digital Equipment Corporation.
Two decades ago, the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi proposed the concept of “flow” to describe the internal state of energized focus that characterizes the mind at its most productive. It’s a lovely metaphor, precisely because it suggests the essential fluidity that good ideas so often need. Flow is not the singular intensity of focusing “like a laser,” as we often say. And it is not the miraculous illumination of a sudden brainstorm. Rather, it is more the feeling of drifting along a stream, being carried in a clear direction, but still tossed in surprising ways by the eddies and whirls of moving water.
Liquid networks create an environment where those partial ideas can connect; they provide a kind of dating service for promising hunches. They make it easier to disseminate good ideas, of course, but they also do something more sublime: they help complete ideas.
When the eighteenth-century scientist Joseph Priestley decided to isolate a mint sprig in a sealed glass in an ingenious experiment that ultimately proved that plants were creating oxygen—one of the founding discoveries of modern ecosystem science—he was building on a hunch that he’d been cultivating for twenty years, dating back to his boyhood obsession with trapping spiders in glass jars. He’d had a hunch that there was something interesting in the way that organisms perished when you sealed them in closed vessels, something that pointed to a larger truth. And he kept that hunch alive until he was ready to make sense of it.
You get a feeling that there’s an interesting avenue to explore, a problem that might someday lead you to a solution, but then you get distracted by more pressing matters and the hunch disappears. So part of the secret of hunch cultivation is simple: write everything down.
We can see Darwin’s ideas evolve because on some basic level the notebook platform creates a cultivating space for his hunches; it is not that the notebook is a mere transcription of the ideas, which are happening offstage somewhere in Darwin’s mind. Darwin was constantly rereading his notes, discovering new implications. His ideas emerge as a kind of duet between the present-tense thinking brain and all those past observations recorded on paper.
You need a system for capturing hunches, but not necessarily categorizing them, because categories can build barriers between disparate ideas, restrict them to their own conceptual islands. This is one way in which the human history of innovation deviates from the natural history. New ideas do not thrive on archipelagos.
Over a hundred editions of the guide were published, and it remained a common staple of British households well into the twentieth century. One musty copy of the book lingered into the 1960s, in the home of a pair of mathematicians living in the suburbs of London. The couple had a young son who was drawn to the “suggestion of magic” in the book’s title, and who spent hours exploring this “portal to the world of information.” The title stuck in the back of his mind, along with that wondrous feeling of exploring an immense trove of data. More than a decade later, he was working as a software consultant in a Swiss research lab, and found himself overwhelmed by the flow of information and the personnel churn in the organization. As a side project, he began tinkering with an application that would allow him to keep track of all that data. When it came time to give his program a name, his mind drifted back to that strange Victorian household encyclopedia from his youth. He called his application Enquire. The application allowed you to store small blocks of information about people or projects as nodes in a connected network. It was easy to attach two-way pointers between nodes, so if you pulled up a person’s name, you could instantly see all the projects he or she was working on. The application proved to be genuinely informative, but the programmer soon switched jobs and abandoned the code. He started up another version, which he called Tangle, a few years later, but it never got…
in the marginThe web
Bill Gates (and his successor at Microsoft, Ray Ozzie) are famous for taking annual reading vacations. During the year they deliberately cultivate a stack of reading material—much of it unrelated to their day-to-day focus at Microsoft—and then they take off for a week or two and do a deep dive into the words they’ve stockpiled. By compressing their intake into a matter of days, they give new ideas additional opportunities to network among themselves, for the simple reason that it’s easier to remember something that you read yesterday than it is to remember something you read six months ago.
The secret to organizational inspiration is to build information networks that allow hunches to persist and disperse and recombine.
Too often, real-world suggestion boxes feel like a black hole; you drop your idea in the slot, and never hear about it again. In a public forum like Idea Exchange, not only do you get to see and improve other people’s suggestions, but you get tangible evidence that your ideas can make a difference.
De Forest triggered a surge of voltage through the spark gap, and as the machine crackled, he could see the flame of the burner instantly change from red to white heat. De Forest later estimated that the flame’s intensity had increased by several candlepower. Somehow, for reasons that de Forest could not explain, the electromagnetic pulse of the spark gap was intensifying the energy of a flame fifteen feet away. Watching that flame shift from red to white planted the seed of an idea in de Forest’s head: that a gas could be employed as a wireless detector, one that might be more sensitive than anything Marconi or Tesla had created to date. De Forest had stumbled across a classic slow hunch. In his autobiography, de Forest described the gas-flame detector as “a subject that had ever since been in the back of my mind.” In the end, that hunch would mature into an invention that ultimately changed the landscape of the twentieth century, an invention that made radio, television, and the first digital computers possible.
The history of being spectacularly right has a shadow history lurking behind it: a much longer history of being spectacularly wrong, again and again. And not just wrong, but messy.
Two brilliant scientists with great technological acumen stumble across evidence of the universe’s origin—evidence that would ultimately lead to a Nobel Prize for both them—and yet their first reaction is: Our telescope must be broken.
The “dissenting” actors prodded the other subjects into exploring new rooms in the adjacent possible, even though they were, technically speaking, adding incorrect data to the environment.
Her research suggests a paradoxical truth about innovation: good ideas are more likely to emerge in environments that contain a certain amount of noise and error. You would think that innovation would be more strongly correlated with the values of accuracy, clarity, and focus. A good idea has to be correct on some basic level, and we value good ideas because they tend to have a high signal-to-noise ratio. But that doesn’t mean you want to cultivate those ideas in noise-free environments, because noise-free environments end up being too sterile and predictable in their output. The best innovation labs are always a little contaminated.
One might think, given the severe threat associated with transcoding errors, that there would be extraordinary selection pressure to make the DNA repair system foolproof. Parents who made perfect copies of their germ cells would have healthier offspring, while parents with faulty DNA repair would have fewer surviving offspring, thanks to their higher mutation rates. Over time, the genes for foolproof DNA repair would spread through the society at large. The complexity of the DNA repair system suggests that evolution did largely follow this path, only it stopped short of eliminating error altogether.
Humans have relatively good vision, as mammals go, but we can’t read magazine text from five hundred feet. That’s not necessarily a sign that there is something adaptive about that limitation; it’s more likely that it’s hard to engineer an eye that can see that well; and, as powerful as evolution is, it can’t do everything. Presumably we would have been more evolutionarily “fit” if we’d been able to run a hundred miles per hour, too, but the restrictions of our bone and muscle structure kept us from being able to outrace the cheetahs. Why couldn’t the same be true of our imperfect DNA repair system?
Sex and error turn out to have a long interconnected history, which is probably not news to those who remember their college love life.
But if our lucky bacterium could suddenly switch to sexual reproduction, as the water flea does, the outcome might be very different, because in sexual reproduction you only pass along half your genes to your offspring. The next generation can inherit her father’s knack for scavenging and her mother’s gift for accurate DNA repair. We
it becomes clear that so much of life on earth embraced sexual reproduction for another reason: because sex helped harness the generative power of error while mitigating the risks. Sex keeps the door to the adjacent possible open by just a crack, so that we can adapt to the changing pressures or opportunities of our environment.
It’s not that mistakes are the goal—they’re still mistakes, after all, which is why you want to get through them quickly. But those mistakes are an inevitable step on the path to true innovation.
new abilities and traits come about not because there is some inexorable march toward more and more complexity in the biosphere, but rather because natural selection has the Nairobi cobbler’s instinct for taking old parts and putting them to new uses.
“The larger a city, the greater the variety of its manufacturing, and also the greater both the number and the proportion of its small manufacturers.”
Cities, however, are the natural homes of supermarkets and standard movie houses plus delicatessens, Viennese bakeries, foreign groceries, art movies, and so on, all of which can be found co-existing, the standard with the strange, the large with the small. Wherever lively and popular parts of cities are found, the small much outnumber the large.
The modernism of the 1920s exhibited so much cultural innovation in such a short period of time because the writers, poets, artists, and architects were all rubbing shoulders at the same cafés. They weren’t off on separate islands, teaching creative writing seminars or doing design reviews. That physical proximity made the space rich with exaptation: the literary stream of consciousness influencing the dizzying new perspectives of cubism; the futurist embrace of technological speed in poetry shaping new patterns of urban planning.
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.
Genres supply a set of implicit rules that have enough coherence that traditionalists can safely play inside them, and more adventurous artists can confound our expectations by playing with them. Genres are the platforms and paradigms of the creative world.
Pileated woodpeckers make their homes by drilling large holes in dead trees. But woodpeckers don’t have the resources to kill off trees on their own, so they’re largely dependent on stumbling across trees that have died of natural causes. But in creating their forest wetlands, beavers are constantly toppling trees, and so pileated woodpeckers flourish in the engineered ecosystem created by the beavers. They get the benefit of the softer, more pliable wood of a rotting tree, without the cost of having to fell the tree.
The sea bass and mussels making a home in a decommissioned A train, like the songbirds nesting in the abandoned homes of the pileated woodpeckers, mirror a pattern Jane Jacobs detected years ago in urban development: innovation thrives in discarded spaces.
He soon discovered that the system generated eight times as much cement if you pumped the water full of carbon dioxide, like some oversized, salty club soda. One day, when Khosla came to inspect the lab, Constantz turned to his investor and asked, “Where can we get large quantities of carbon dioxide?” Khosla looked at him in disbelief. As one of the world’s most prominent clean-tech investors, Khosla was well aware that the planet was teeming with industrial plants who were desperately trying to find a place to put their carbon dioxide. Entire markets were emerging around technologies of carbon sequestration, locking up CO2 by injecting it into oil and gas reserves, or burying it deep in the ocean. But Constantz had stumbled across a much more powerful idea. You didn’t have to bury all that CO2. You could use it to build stuff.
All those services and standards were essential to the web of information that benefited from those 140 characters, but not one of them required a business development deal, or a licensing fee, or even an old-fashioned handshake. You can build on all of them without asking for permission, and when you don’t have to ask for permission, innovation thrives.
Thanks to Carrier’s brilliant idea, the second half of the twentieth century saw a mass migration within the United States to the Sunbelt and to Deep South climates that had been nearly intolerable before the widespread adoption of air conditioning. It is not exaggerating matters to say that Carrier’s idea ultimately rearranged the social and political map of America.
The promise of an immense payday encourages people to come up with useful innovations, but at the same time it forces people to protect those innovations.
Efficiency is generally held to be a universal goal for any economy—unless the economy happens to traffic in ideas. If ideas were fully liberated, then entrepreneurs wouldn’t be able to profit from their innovations, because their competitors would immediately adopt them. And so where innovation is concerned, we have deliberately built inefficient markets: environments that protect copyrights and patents and trade secrets and a thousand other barricades we’ve erected to keep promising ideas out of the minds of others.
in the marginFascinating
Like any complex social reality, creating innovation environments is a matter of trade-offs. All other things being equal, financial incentives will indeed spur innovation. The problem is, all other things are never equal. When you introduce financial rewards into a system, barricades and secrecy emerge, making it harder for the open patterns of innovation to work their magic. So the question is: What is the right balance?
Academics are paid salaries, of course, and successful ideas can lead to much-sought-after tenured professorships, but the economic rewards are minuscule compared to those of the private sector. And, crucially, those rewards are not dependent on introducing an artificial inefficiency into the information network. A historian who develops a brilliant new theory about the origins of the Industrial Revolution may well land a chaired professorship at an Ivy League school thanks to her theory, but the theory itself can freely circulate through the environment, where it can be challenged, enlarged, exapted, and recycled in countless ways.
This is a pattern we see again and again in the modern era: fourth-quadrant innovation creates a new open platform that commercial entities can then build upon, either by repackaging and refining the original breakthrough, or by developing emergent innovations on top of the underlying platform.
We do not have a ready-made political vocabulary for the fourth quadrant, particularly the noninstitutional forms of collaboration that have developed around the open-source community.
In 1865, Engels wrote to a friend, “Nothing discredits modern bourgeois development so much as the fact that it has not yet succeeded in getting beyond the economic forms of the animal world.” As it turned out, the exact opposite happened. Darwin’s theories were invoked countless times in the twentieth century as a defense of the free-market system. Aligning them with the animal world didn’t discredit markets, as Engels had predicted. It made markets look natural.
The Nairobi entrepreneur selling sandals in an open-air market may indeed be in competition with other cobblers, but what makes his trade possible is the junkyard full of tires waiting to be freely converted into footwear, and the fact that the good idea of converting tires into sandals can be passed from cobbler to cobbler by simple observation, with no licensing agreements to restrict the flow.
We may very well decide as a society that people simply deserve to profit from their good ideas, and so we have to introduce a little artificial scarcity to ensure those rewards. As someone who creates intellectual property for a living, I am more than sympathetic toward that argument. But it is another matter altogether to argue that those restrictions will themselves promote innovation in the long run.
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.
Generative platforms require all the patterns of innovation we have seen over the preceding pages; they need to create a space where hunches and serendipitous collisions and exaptations and recycling can thrive. It is possible to create such a space in a walled garden. But you are far better off situating your platform in a commons.
Ideas rise in crowds, as Poincaré said.
Yes, the market has been a great engine of innovation. But so has the reef.
Go for a walk; cultivate hunches; write everything down, but keep your folders messy; embrace serendipity; make generative mistakes; take on multiple hobbies; frequent coffeehouses and other liquid networks; follow the links; let others build on your ideas; borrow, recycle, reinvent. Build a tangled bank.
Dean Keith Simonton’s Origins of Genius and Howard Gruber’s Darwin on Man both explicitly take a Darwinian approach to innovation, and use that approach to make sense of Darwin’s own distinct genius.