Where Good Ideas Come From

Where Good Ideas Come From

The Natural History of Innovation

Steven Johnson

Where Good Ideas Come From is a good book about creative ideas. It is not like other books in this area because the writer Steven Johnson used a special method to introduce good ideas and where it can be produced.

Frist of all, in the Introduction, the writer used 3 different examples to introduce 3 great ideas to readers, the first one was Darwin’s Paradox, which talked about the crowded pageantry of the reef in a poor island. The second one was Superlinear City which introduced something about the environment of a big city was making its residents significantly more innovative than residents of smaller towns. The last one was The 10/10 Rule, which showed the necessary time of a new production’s being processed. Through these examples, Steven Johnson told readers that good ideas might not want to be free, but they did want to connect, fuse, recombine.

After the introduction, Steven Johnson began his main chapter in a various simple but interesting names. They were The Adjacent Possible, Liquid Networks, The Slow Hunch, Serendipity, Error, Exaptation, and Platform. The similar character was that the writer used a lot of examples in different areas to introduce good ideas. At the first glance, readers may feel confused, but after one and one examples, readers will become clear because Steven Johnson talked the main idea gradually. Besides, Johnson also used a special written skill to introduce some important theories. For example, he used a London’s café and a salon to talk about the place where good ideas often came from.

At last, Steven Johnson researched 200 inventions in the last 400 years, and divided them into four parts, Market/Individual, Market/Network, Non-Market/Individual, and Non-market/Network. And he found that at the first years, most inventions were Non-Market/Individual, but with the development of the industry, most inventions became Market/Network. Johnson didn’t state much more about how to get good ideas, but he really told readers where good ideas came from through history’s examples.

In terms of me, a media person, good ideas are really important. We have visited about 10 startups, from all of our field trips, I cannot only learn the importance of a good idea, but also can find my own ideas from each of them. There are two startups impress me. One is EMUSIC and another is SPACESPLITTER. The EMUSIC uses a different way to provide music to music fans compared to iTunes, while the SPACESPLITTER runs the company based on the ideas from students’ daily lives. They both are the models of having good ideas.

After reading Johnson’s book, I had a deeper recognition of good ideas and media. Because I studied Engineering before, I understood media based on my own experience. However, they were just parts of the real media. To a media person, idea is the key point in his or her life. We need to build more creative ideas, not copy the ideas which have already existed, that means we need to innovate, not imitate. Analyzing Johnson’s data about the four categories, I found another interesting point. Because of the pattern Market/Network, Intellectual Property became more and more important. To media person, when you have a good idea, what you should do is to make it come true, and then protect your achievement.