Where Good Ideas Come From

A society organized around marketplaces, instead of castles or cloisters, distributes decision-making authority across a much larger network of individual minds.

The long-zoom approach lets us see that openness and connectivity may, in the end, be more valuable to innovation than purely competitive mechanisms.

The other organizational technique for facilitating serendipitous connections is the “brainstorm” session,

Reproducing asexually makes perfect sense during prosperous periods: if life is good, keep doing what you’re doing. Don’t mess with success by introducing new genetic combinations. But when the world gets more challenging—scarce resources, predators, parasites—you need to innovate. And the quickest path to innovation lies in making novel connection

Environments that block or limit those new combinations—by punishing experimentation, by obscuring certain branches of possibility, by making the current state so satisfying that no one bothers to explore the edges—will, on average, generate and circulate fewer innovations than environments that encourage exploration.

If mutation and error and serendipity unlock new doors in the biosphere’s adjacent possible, exaptations help us explore the new possibilities that lurk behind those doors.

The best innovation labs are always a little contaminated.

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.

Government bureaucracies have a long and richly deserved reputation for squelching innovation, but they possess four key elements that may allow them to benefit from the innovation engine of an emergent platform. First, they are repositories of a vast amount of information and services that could be of potential value to ordinary people, if only we