Quotes from Steven Johnson

If you're trying to "transform reality" you need to give your ideas the time they need to mature; don't just look for sudden epiphanies. Cultivate your hunches.

The poet and the engineer (and the coral reef) may seem a million miles apart in their particular forms of expertise, but when they bring good ideas into the world, similar patterns of development and collaboration shape that process.

The coffeehouse model of creativity helps explain one of those strange paradoxes of twenty-first-century business innovation. Even as much of the high-tech culture has embraced decentralized, liquid networks in their approach to innovation, the company that is consistently ranked as the most innovative in the world—Apple—remains defiantly top-down and almost comically secretive in its development of new products.

Good ideas may not want to be free, but they do want to connect, fuse, recombine.

What we rarely do is recognize the way glass supports this entire network: we take pictures through glass lenses, store and manipulate them on circuit boards made of fiberglass, transmit them around the world via glass cables, and enjoy them on screens made of glass. It's silicon dioxide all the way down the chain.

The towns might have lacked air conditioning and laptops and cable television, but they managed to keep their Toyota 4Runners on the road. So Rosen approached Prestero with an idea: What if you made an incubator out of automobile parts? Three years after Rosen suggested the idea, the Design that Matters team introduced a prototype device called the NeoNurture. From the outside, it looked like a streamlined modern incubator, but its guts were automotive.

Good ideas are like the NeoNurture device. They are, inevitably, constrained by the parts and skills that surround them.

A city that was ten times larger than its neighbor wasn't ten times more innovative; it was seventeen times more innovative.

But how do you get those particular clusters of neurons to fire at the right time? One way is to go for a walk. The history of innovation is replete with stories of good ideas that occurred to people while they were out on a stroll. (A similar phenomenon occurs with long showers or soaks in a tub; in fact, the original "eureka" moment—Archimedes hitting upon a way of measuring the volume of irregular shapes—occurred in a bathtub.)

Nature's innovations, too, rely on spare parts. Evolution advances by taking available resources and cobbling them together to create new uses.

that is the unpredictable power of exaptations. Chance favors the connected mind.

A metropolis fifty times bigger than a town was 130 times more innovative.

Benjamin Franklin, who knew a few things about innovation himself, said it best: "Perhaps the history of the errors of mankind, all things considered, is more valuable and interesting than that of their discoveries. Truth is uniform and narrow; it constantly exists, and does not seem to require so much an active energy, as a passive aptitude of soul in order to encounter it. But error is endlessly diversified.

The same pattern appears again and again throughout the evolution of life. Indeed, one way to think about the path of evolution is as a continual exploration of the adjacent possible.

His radical breakthrough relied, instead, on the ubiquity of the screw press in Rhineland wine-making culture, and on his ability to reach out beyond his specific field of expertise and concoct new uses for an older technology. He took a machine designed to get people drunk and turned it into an engine for mass communication.

Sony inaugurated research into the first consumer videocassette recorder in 1969, but didn't ship its first Betamax for another seven years, and VCRs didn't become a household necessity until the mid-eighties.

Evolutionary biologists have a word for this kind of borrowing, first proposed in an influential 1971 essay by Stephen Jay Gould and Elisabeth Vrba: exaptation. An organism develops a trait optimized for a specific use, but then the trait gets hijacked for a completely different function.

The Web has explored the adjacent possible of its medium far faster than any other communications technology in history.

You can see the fingerprints of the adjacent possible in one of the most remarkable patterns in all of intellectual history, what scholars now call "the multiple": A brilliant idea occurs to a scientist or inventor somewhere in the world, and he goes public with his remarkable finding, only to discover that three other minds had independently come up with the same idea in the past year.

Carbon may be a talented connector, but without a medium that allows it to collide randomly with other elements, those connective powers are likely to go to waste. All

Ogburn and Thomas found 148 instances of independent innovation, most them occurring within the same decade.

Good ideas are not conjured out of thin air; they are built out of a collection of existing parts, the composition of which expands (and, occasionally, contracts) over time. Some of those parts are conceptual: ways of solving problems, or new definitions of what constitutes a problem in the first place. Some of them are, literally, mechanical parts.

whether cities or bodies—find productive uses for the waste they create.

The adjacent possible is as much about limits as it is about openings. At every moment in the timeline of an expanding biosphere, there are doors that cannot be unlocked yet.