Where Good Ideas Come From
Advance uncorrected proof
6. Max Kleiber. "negative quarter power scaling" metabolism scales to mass to the negative quarter power. Take the square root of 1,000 = approx 31, then take the square root of 31 = approx 5.5. This means a cow roughly a thousand times heavier than a woodchuck will on average live 5.5 times longer, and have a heart rate that is 5.5 times slower than the woodchucks. This also applies to plants and other biology. "Whenever life appeared, whenever an organsim had to figure out a way to consume and distribute energy through a body, negative quarter-power scaling governed the patterns of its development."
7. Geoffrey West. Investigated the application of negative quarter power scaling of cities. "Did "metabolism" of urban life slow down as cities grew in size?" "The number of gasoline stations, gasoline sales, road surface area, the length of electric cables follow the exact same power law that governs the speed with which energy is expended in biological organisms". In terms of creativity measured by patents, R&D bugets, and "supercreative" professionals. So for a city that's ten times larger than the next means it will be seventeen times more innovative. A metropolis fifty times bigger than a town was 130 times more innovative. "Klieber's law proved that as life gets bigger, it slows down." As cities get bigger you have "superlinear scaling". The average resident of a metropolis of five million was almost 3x more creative than the average resident of a town of a hundred thousand. Jane Jacobs wrote: "Great cities are not like towns only larger."
9. The 10/10 Rule. "It took ten years for color TV to go from the fringes to the mainstream; two generations later, it took HDTV just as long to achieve mass success." "A decade to build the new platform, and a decade for it to find a mass audience."
12. The 10/10 Rule. First commercial AM radio broadcast in 1920. Mass adoption followed in the late 1920s. 1969, Sony prototyped a video recorder to go commercial seven years later, VCR mass adoption mid-80s. DVD player didn't replace the VCR until 2006, nine years after first players were sold. Cell phones, personal computers, GPS devices took similar time from innovation to mass adoption.
14. 10/10. Graphical user interface demo by Engelbart 1968. 1970s Xerox PARC developed the commercial product released in 1981 as the Xerox Star workstation, followed by Macintosh in 1984. Windows 3.0 in 1990 made GUIs norm. This pattern of development and adoption followed with other software, word processors, spreadsheets, e-mail clients.
14-15. "YouTube went from idea to mass adoption in less than two years." Innovation of this type on the web took the 10/10 rule and made it 1/1
19. "I call the vantage point the 'long zoom'." "As you descend toward the center of the glass, the biological scales contract, from the global, deep time of evolution to the microscopic exchanges of neurons or DNA. At the center of the glass, the perspective shifts from nature to culture, and the scales widen: from individual thoughts and private workspaces to immense cities and global information networks. When we look at the history of innovation from the vantage point of the long zoom, what we find is that unusually generative environments display similar patterns of creativity at multiple scales simultaneously. You can't explain the biodiversity of the coral reef simply studying the genetics of the coral itself. The reef generates and sustains so many different forms of ife because of patterns that recur on the scales of cells, organisms, and the wider ecosystem itself. The sources of innovation in the city and the Web are equally fractal. In this sense, seeing the problem of innovation from the long-zoom perspective does not just give us new metaphors. It gives us new 'facts'."
global evolution
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20. "Good ideas may not want to be free, but they do want to connect, fuse, recombine. They want to reinvent themselves by crossing conceptual boarders. They want to complete each other as much as they want to compete."
21. Prestero from the organization 'Design that Matters' to provide useful tech to the developing world. Johnathan Rosen approached Prestero to make an affordable incubator made from car parts, the NeoNurture. Existing incubators cost $40,000. The encubator was invented by Stephane Tarnier in the late 1870s after observing a chicken hatchery at the Paris Zoo.
26. "Good ideas are like the NeoNurture device. They are, inevitably, constrained by the parts and skills that surround them. We have a natural tendency to romanticize breakthrough innovation, imagining momentous ideas transcending their surroundings, a gifted mind somehow seeing over the detritus of old ideas and ossified tradition. But ideas are works of bricolage; they're built out of that detritus. We take the ideas we've inherited or that we've stumbled across, and we jigger them together into some new shape. We like to think our ideas as a $40,000 incubator, shipping direct from the factory, but in reality they've been cobbled together with spare parts that happen to be sitting in the garage."
28. Stuart Kauffman, the adjacent possible "The phrase captures both the limits and the creative potential of change and innovation. In the case of prebiotic chemistry, the adjacent possible defines all those molecular reactions that were directly achievable in the primordial soup. Sunflowers and mosquitoes annd brains exist outside that circle of possibility. The adjacent possible is a kind of shadow future, hovering on the edges of the present state of things, a map of all the ways in which the present can reinvent itself. Yet is it not an infinite space, or a toally open playing field. The number of potential first-order reactions is vast, but it is a finite number, and it excludes most of the forms that now populate the biospheree. What the adjacent possible tells us is that at any moment the world is capable of extraordinary change, but only 'certain' changes can happen.
The strange and beautiful truth about the adjacent possible is that its boundaries grow as you explore those boundaries. Each new combination usheres new combinations into the adjacent possible. Think of it as a house that magically expands with each door you open. You begin in a room with four doors, each leading to a new room that you haven't visited yet. Those four rooms are the adjacent possible. But once you open one of those doors and stroll into that room, three new doors appear, each leading to a brand-new room that you couldn't have reached from your original starting point. Keep opening new doors and eventually you'll have built a palace.
Basic fatty acids will naturally self-organize into spheres lined with a dual layer of molecules, very similar to the membranes that define the boundaries of modern cells. Once the fatty acids combine to form those bounded spheres, a new wing of the adjacent possible opens up, because those molecules implicitly create a fundamental division between the inside and outside of the sphere. This division is the very essense of a cell. Once you have an "inside," you can put things there: food, organelles, genetic code. Small molecules can pass through the membrane and then combine with other molecules to form larger entities too big to escape back through the boundaries of the proto-cell. When the first fatty acids spontaneously formed those dual-layed membranes, they opened a door into the adjacent possible that would ultimately lead to nucleotide-based genetic code, and the power plants of the chloroplasts and mitochondria--the primary "inhabitants" of all modern cells."
30. "Four billion years ago, if you were a carbon atom, there were a few hundred molecular configuration you could stumble into. Today that same carbon atom, whose atomic properties haven't changed one single nanogram, can help build a sperm wale or a giant redwood or an H1N1 virus, along with near-infinite list of other carbon-based life forms that were not part of the adjacent possible of prebiotic earth."
32. "the multiple" : Sun spots were discovered in 1611 by four scientists living in four different countries. The first electric battery was invented seperately by Dean Von Kleist and Cuneus of Leyden in 1745 and 1746. Prestley and Scheele idepedently isolated oxygen between 1772 and 1774. The law of conservation of energy was formulated separately four times in the late 1840s. The evolutionary importance of genetic mutation was proposed by Korschinsky in 1899 and then by de Vries in 1901, while the impact of X-rays on mutation rates was independently uncovered by two scholars in 1927. Multiples are found in telephone, telegraph, steam engine, photograph, vacuum tube, radio.
32. William Ogburn and Dorothy Thomas in the essay 'Are Inventions Inevitable?'. They found 148 instances of independent artifacts within a decade.
34. Charles Babbage. Difference Engine: fifteen ton machine with over 25,000 mechanical parts designed to calculate polynomial function essential to creating trigonometric tables crucial to navigation. Not built in his lifetime. Swiss inventor Per Georg Scheutz constructed a Difference Engine debuted at Exposition Universelle of 1855. Within twenty years the design was reduced to the size of a sewing machine. 1884, William S. Burroughs founds American Arithmometer Company to sell mass-produced calculators to businesses word-wide.
35. Charles Babbage. Analytical Engine. 1837. Built only a small portion before his death. Considered the first programmable computer. Ada Lovelace the first programmer.
"Babbage's design for the engine anticipated the basic structure of all contemporary computers: "programs" were to be inputted via punch cards, which had been invented decades before to control textile looms: instructions and data were captured in a "store," the equivalent of what we now call random access memory, or RAM; and calculations were executed via a system that Babbage called "the mill," using industrial-era language to describe what we now call the central processing unit, or CPU." After 100 years these design elements where adopted around WW2.
37. "To use our microbiology analogy, having the idea for a Difference Engine in the 1830s was like a bunch of fatty acids trying to form a cell membrane."
38. "But trying to create an Analytical Engine in 1850--or YouTube in 1995--was the equivalent of those fatty acids trying to self-organize into a sea urchin. The idea was right, but the environment wasn't ready for it yet."
"What kind of environment creates good ideas? The simplest way to answer it is this: innovative environments are better at helping their inhabitant explore the adjacent possible, because they expose a wide and diverse sample of spare parts--mechanical or conceptual--and they encourage novel ways of recombining those parts. 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. The infinite variety of life that so impessed Darwin, standing in the calm waters of the Keeling Islands, exists because the coral reef is supremely gifted at recyclying and reinventing the spare parts of its ecosystem."
43. A good idea is a network, a constelation of nuerons exploring the adjacent possible.
"Your brain has roughly 100 billion neurons, an impressive enough number, but all those neurons would be useless for creating ideas (as well as all the other achievements of the human brain) if they weren't capable of making such elaborate connections with each other. The average neuron connects to a thousand other neurons scattered across the brain, which means that the adult human brain contains 100 trillion distinct neuronal connections, making it the largest and most complex network on earth. (By comparison, there are somewhere on the order of 40 billion pages on the Web. If you assume an average of ten links per page, that means that you and I are walking around with a high-density network in our skulls that is orders of magnitude larger than the entirety of the World Wide Web.)"
44. to be creative the network needs to be 'plastic' able to adopt new configurations. "What matters in your mind is not just the number of neurons, but the myriad connections that have formed between them."
45. Brain toward more creative networks: its fractal: place it inside environments that share the same network signature: networks of ideas or people that mimic the neural networks of a mind exploring the boundaries of the adjacent possible.
46. "Why are we so confident about carbon's essential role in creating living things? The answer has to do with the core properties of the carbon atom itself. Carbon has four valence electrons residing in the outermost shell of the atom, which, for complicated reasons, makes it uniquely talented at forming connections with other atoms, particularly with hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus, sulfur--and, crucially, with other carbon atoms. These six atoms make up 99 percent of the dry weight of all living organisms on forming the elaborate chains and rings of polymers: everything from the genetic information stored in nucleic acids, to the building blocks of proteins, to the energy storage of carbohydrates and fats, (Modern technology has exploited the generative potential of the carbon atom via the artificial polymers we call plastics.) Carbon atoms measure only 0.03 percent of the overall composition of the earth's crust, and yet they make up nearly 20 percent of our body mass. That abundance highlights the unique property of the carbon atom: its combinatorial power. Carbon is a connector."
carbon forms chains of nucleic acids instructing amino acids to assemble into the long strings of protein, powered by the stored energy of carbohydrates. "Those four valence electroncs allowed the prebiotic earth to explore its own adjacent possible, sifting through the long list of potential molecular combinations until it hit upon a series of stable chemical reations that blossomed into the first organisms."
47. "1953, two University of Chicago professors, Stanley L. Miller and Harold C. Urey, created a closed system of glass tubes and flasks that simulated the early conditions of the prebiotic earth. The main ingredients were methane (CH4), ammonia (NH5), hydrogen (H2), and water (H20). Only the methane contained carbon atoms. One flask connected to the chemical soup contained a pair of electrodes, which Miller and Urey used to simulate lightning by triggering a series of quick sparks between them. They ran the experiment for seven straight days, and by the time they had completed the first cycle, they found that more than 10 percent of the carbon had spontaneously recombined into many of the organic compounds essential to life: sugars, lipids, nucleic acids. Miller claimed at the time that "just turning on the spark in a basic pre-biotic experiment" produced half of the twenty-two amino acids. Miller claimed at the time "just turning on the spark in a basic pre-biotic experiment" produced half of the twenty-two amino acids. Several years ago, a team reanalyzed the original flasks from the Miller-Urey experiments, and found that in one version--which simulated the environment around an undersea volcano--all twenty-two amino acids had been created."
47. "...theories have emerged to explain the early stages of life, some emphasizing the development of metabolism; some are predicated on the intense heat of underwater vents, others on life-bearing comets colliding with the earth's surface." they all share a carbon basis.
49. Consistency and diversity: "The combination of water's fluidity and solubility makes it marvelously adept at creating new networks of elements, as they churn through the ever-shifting medium, colliding with each other in unpredictable ways. At the same time, the strength of the hydrogen bonds means that new combinations with some stability to them--many of them anchored around carbon atoms--can endure and seek out additional connections in the soup.
And so, when we look back to the original innovation engine on earth, we find two essential properties. First, a capacity to make new connections with as many other elements as possible. And, second, a "randomizing" environment that encourages collisions between all the elements in the system. On earth, at least, the story of life's creativity begins with a liquid, high-desnity network: connection-hungry carbon atoms colliding with other elements in the primordial soup. The molecules they formed mark the point at which chemistry and physics give way to biology. When the first lipids self-essembled, they unlocked a door that would ultimately lead to cell membrane; when the first nucleotides formed, a wing of the adacent possible opened that eventually traced a path to DNA."
50. Christopher Langton: 'gas, liquid, solid' to describe network states
51. hunter-gatherer considered gasious state. Agriculture as solid.
Economist term : 'information spillover' describes the liquidity of of dense settlements.
"As species go, 'Homo sapiens' had been on a fairly good run in the million years that led up to the birth of agriculture: its members had invented spoken language, art, sophisticated tools for hunting, and cooking. But until they settled in cities, they had not figured out a way to live inside a high-desnity liquid network."
54. "If dispersed tribes of hunter-gathereres are the cultural equivalent of a chaotic, gaseous state, a culture where the information is largely passed down by monastic scribes stands at the opposite extreme."
55. 1494. Franciscan friar and mathematician Luca Pacioli standarizes double-entry book keeping: debit / credit method. No one claims ownership of the technique. It became common place in Italy--Genoa, Venice, and Florence shared among Renaissance merchants.
"The innovation power of the marketplace derives, in part, from this most elemental math: no matter how smart the "authorities" may be, if they are outnumbered a thousand to one by the marketplace, there will be more good ideas lurking in the market than in the feudal castle. Cities and markets recruit more minds into the collective project of exploring the adjacent possible."
56. 1964. Arthur Koestler. 'The Act of Creation'.
57. Thomas Kuhn's 'The Structure of Scientific Revolutions'
"Some focused on biographical accounts of legendary scientists at work; others tested theories through lab experiements that simulated the kind of cognitive work involved in scientific discovery. Others conducted extensive interviews with prominent researchers, asking them to recall the details of their eureka moments and private paradigm shifts."
Early 90s. Kevin Dunbar. Watched scientists as they worked. Setup cameras ; interviewed researchers as they progressed. Dunbar called this in vivo ; study in the wild.
"Dunbar and his team transcribed all the interactions and coded each exchange using a classification scheme that allowed them to track patterns in the flow of information through the lab. In group interactions, for instance, exchanges between scientists could be formally coded as "clarification" or "agreement and elaboration" or "questioning." Most important, Dunbar tracked the conceptual changes that occured over the course of each project: a researcher baffled by persistent problems in achieving a stable control result who suddenly realizes that the control problemcould be the basis for a whole new experiment; an exchange between two scientists working on different projects who recognize a suprising and important connection between their work.
The most striking discovery in Dunbar's study turned out to be the physical location where most of the important breakthroughs occured." Most innovation doesn't happen in solitude. "Instead, most important ideas emerged during regular lab meetings, where a dozen or so researchers would gather and informally present and discuss their latest work."
59. "Dunbar uncovered a set of interactions that consistently led to important breakthroughs during lab conversations. The group environment helped recontextualize problems, as questions from coleagues forced researchers to think about their experiments on a different scale or level. Group interactions challenged researchers' assumptions about their more surprising findings, making them less likely to dismiss them as experimental error. In group problem-solving sessions, Dunbar writes, "the results of one person's reasoning became the input to another person's reasoning. . .resulting in significant changes in all aspects of the way the research was conducted." Productive analogies between different specialized fields were more likely to emerge in the conversational setting of the lab meeting."
60. MIT's Building 20. Stewart Brand 'How Buildings Learn'.
61. November 2007. Martha Clarkson. Microsoft Building 99.
62. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi described "flow" 20 years ago. "...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."
75. Huntches. "...the snap judgments of intuition--as powerful as they can be--are rarities in the history of world-changing ideas. Most hunches that turn into important innovations unfold over much longer time frames. They start with a vague, hard-to-describe sense that there's an interesting solution to a problem that hasn't yet been proposed, and they linger in the shadows of the mind, sometimes for decades, assembling new connections and gaining strength. And then one day they emerge into the light of day: sometimes jolted out by some newly discovered trove of information, or by another hunch lingering in another mind, or by some internal association that finally completes the thought. Because these slow hunches need so much time to develop, they are fragile creatures, easily lost to the more pressing needs of day-to-day issues. But that long incubation period is also their strength, because true insights require you to think something that no one has thought before in quite the same way. Flash judgments are often just that--judgments. Is this guy trustworthy or not? Is the sculpture a fake? A new idea is something larger than that: it's a new perspective on a problem, or a recognition of a new opportunity that has gone unexplored to date. Those kinds of breakthroughs usually take time to develop. When the eighteenth-century scientist Joseph Priestley decided to isolate a mint sprig in a sealed glass in an igenious 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..."
91. Google : 20% time: every 4 hours means 1 hour of pet project time.
50% of Google's new products come from 20% time. Adsense was partially built. 2009 Google recieved $5billion, nearly 1/3 of total income for the year. Orkut founded a social network tool reflecting his name at a Turkish Google. Gmail was developed this way.
92. Krishna Bharat, principle scientist at Google, built StoryRank on 20% time modeled after the PageRank algorithm for search, which later became Google News. In one year the idea became product.
102. Diversity and Consistency: "The waking brain, too, has an appetite for the generative chaos that rules in the dream state. Neurons share information by passing chemicals across the synaptic gap that connects them, but they also communicate via a more indirect channel: they synchronize their firing rates. For reasons that are not entirely understood, large clusters of neurons will regularly fire at the exact same frequency. (Imagine a discordant jazz band, each member following a different time signature and tempo, that suddenly snaps into a waltz at precisely 120 beats per minute.) This is what neuroscientists call phase-locking. There is a kind of beautiful synchrony to phase-locking--millions of neurons pulsing in perfect rhythm. But the brain also seems to require periods of electrical chaos, where neurons are completely out of sync with each other. If you follow the various frequencies of brain-wave activity with an EEG, the effect is not unlike turning the dial on an AM radio: periods of structured, rhythmic patterns, interrupted by static and noise. The brain's systems are "tuned" for noise, but only in controlled bursts."
103. 2007. Robert Thatcher. University of South Florida. Average children have phase-lock for 55 milliseconds. Another percentage had 60 millisecond phase-locks. "Every extra millisecond spent in the chaotic mode added as much as twenty IQ points. Longer spells in phase-lock 'deducted' IQ points, though not as dramatically." The study suggests the more disorganized the brain is, the smarter it can become.
"...Thatcher and other researchers believe that the electric noise of the chaos mode allows the brain to experiment with new links between neurons that would otherwise fail to connect in more orderly settings. The phase-lock mode (the theory goes) is where the brain executes an established plan or habit. The chaos mode is where the brain assimilates new information, explores strategies for responding to a changed situation. In this sense, the chaos mode is a kind of background dreaming: a wash of noise that makes new connections possible. Even in our waking hours, it turns out, our brains gravitate toward the noise and chaos of dreams, fifty-five milliseconds at a time."
105. Why male/female? "...identical DNA makes a prime target for parasites or predators. For these reasons, natural seletion also rewards innovation, life's tendency to discover new ecological niches, new sources of energy. This is what Stuart Kauffman recognized when he first formulated the idea of the adjacent possible: that there is something like an essential drive in the biosphere to diversify into new ways of making a living. Scambling together two distinct sets of DNA with each generation made for a far more complicated reproductive strategy, but it paid immense dividends in the rate of innovation. What we gave up in speed and simplicity, we made up for in creativity."
106. heterogamous reproductive organisms: daphnia, slime molds, algae, aphids
"When nature finds itself in need of new ideas, it strives to connect, not protect."
130. De Forest. Slow huntch. 1900. spark gap machine. 1903. two electrodes in gas-filled tubes, failed. Several years later added a third electrode. Called it Audion to form the basis of the vacuum tube. Deforest admitting, "I didn't know why it worked. It just did."
132. Louis Daguerre. 1830s. Spent years trying to capture images with silver plates. By mistake he stored the plates in a cabinet with chemicals, the fumes from a spilled jar of mercury produced a perfect image on the plate. Thus Daguerreotype.
133. Wilson Greatbatch. Happen to grab the wrong resistor to make a device that became the pacemaker. Developed with William Chardack.
134. By mistake and slow huntch. radiography, vulcanized rubber, and plastic.
136. Kevin Dunbar. Found that over half of the data collected by researchers deviated significantly from what they had been expecting. They tend to treat these results as flaws in their experimental method "some kind of contamination of the original tissue perhaps, or a mechanical malfunction, or an error at the data processing phase. They assumed the result was noise, not signal." "Outsiders working on different problems were much less likely to dismiss the apparent error as useless noise."
137. Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson. discovered cosmic background radiation thinking it was a faulty telescope.
1980s. Charlan Nemeth. Studied the relationship between noise, dissent, and creativity in group environments.
138. Free association. "Take a hundred Americans off the street and ask them to free-associate one the word "green" and forty of them will say "grass." Another forty will offer up another color--"red" or "yellow" or "blue"--or the word "color" itself. The more creative associations only emerge when you get to the bottom 20 percent of responses, the long tail of free association, where words like "Ireland," or "money," or "leaves" appear. Ask them to free-associate off the word "blue" and you'll see the same pattern: 80 percent will either suggest another color or the word "sky," and the last 20 percent of associations will be scattered across dozens of less predictable responses: "jeans," "lake," or "lonely."
139. The following experiment had actors describe the colors inacurately, stimulating the test subjects to give more creative answers.
140. "good ideas are more likely to emerge in environments that contain a certain amount of noise and error." "The best innovation labs are always a little contaminated."
142. Genetic mutation. "Our cells appear to be designed to leave the door open for mutation ever so slightly, just enough to let a small trickle of change and variation in without catastrophic effects for the population as a whole. Recent studies suggest that the mutation rate in human germ cells is roughly one in thirty million base pairs, which means each time parents pass their DNA onto their child, that genetic inheritance come with roughly 150 mutations on average. Much of the machinery in our cells is devoted to preserving and reproducing the signal of the genetic code. But evolution has still made room for noise. "
143. Susan Rosenberg. "When the living is good, Rosenberg's research suggests, bacteria have less of a need for high mutation rates, because their current strategies are well adapted to their environment. But when the environment grows more hostile, the pressure to innovate--to stumble across some new way of eking out a living in a resource-poor setting---shifts the balance of risk versus reward involved in mutation. The risk of your offspring dying from some deadly mutation doesn't look quite as bad if they're going to die of starvation anyway. And if one of those mutations helps the bacteria use the limited energy resources more efficiently, the new gene will quickly spread through the population as the nonmutated bacteria die off."
151. Gutenberg. A goldsmith that studied Rhineland vinters, wine making screw presses. Gutenberg borrowed from a mature technology for a novel application, the printing press. "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 classic example, featured prominently in Gould and Vrba's essay, is bird feathers, which we believe initially evolved for temperature regulation, helping nonflying dinosaurs from the Cretaceous period insulate themselves against cold weather. But when some of their descendants, including a creature we now call 'Archaeopteryx', began experimenting with flight, feathers turned out to be useful for controlling the airflow over the surface of the wing, allowing those first birds to glide. The initial transformation is almost accidental: a tool sculpted by evolutionary pressures for one purpose turns outto have an unexpected property that helps the organism survive in a new way."
152. "All flight feathers, for instance, have pronounced asymmetry to them: the vane on one side of the central shaft is larger than the vane on the opposite side. This lets the feater act as a kind of airfoil, providing lift during the flapping of wings. Birds that fly at unusually high velocities, like hawks, have more extreme asymmetries than slower birds. Yet down feathers that simply provide insulation are perfectly symmetrical. When your feathers are there just to keep you warm, there's no advantage to building slightly off-kilter feathers. Mutations or other general variability in the gene pool inevitably produces feathers that are slightly less symmetrical than average, but those traits don't intensify and spread across generations because they don't convey any reproductive advantage over normal feathers. But once flight speed becomes a property with major implications for survival, those asymmetrical vanes turn out to be extremely useful. Where asymmetry had previously drifted in and out of the gene pool, natural selection now begins sculpting those feathers to make them more aerodynamic. A feather 'adapted' for warmth is now 'exapted' for flight."
154. "When the lobe-finned fish Sarcoptergii first began exploring life at the water's edge, 400 million years ago, the creature had a small swim fan at the end of its fin, supported by narrow rays of bone. As its descendants began to spend more time away from the water, exploiting the copious energy sources of the plants and arthropods that had already conquered life onland, the tip of the lobe-fins turned out to be useful for an activity that acquatic life had rendered unthinkable: walking. Before long, natural selection had refashioned the swim fan into an autopod, the basic architecture of all mammalian ankles and feet. Over time, the autopod itself would be exapted in numerous ways: creating primate hands and fingr optimized for grasping, or those Archaeopteryx wings. In some cases, the autopod was even exapted back to its ancient swim-fan origins, as in the flippers of seals and sea lions."
155. 1800s French weaver Joseph Marie Jacquard developed the first punch cards to weave complex silk patterns with mechanical looms. Punch cards were used until the 1970s for computing.
158. Louis Wirth. 1938. "Urbanism as a Way of Life" claimed metropolitan living lead to social disorganization and alienation, the social ties and comforts of smaller communities breaking down in the tumult of the big city.
Claude Fischer. 1975. Found big cities nurtured subcultures.
159. "Poetry collectives and street gangs might seem miles apart on the surface, but they each depend on the city's capacity for nurturing subcultures."
160. "A world where a diverse mix of distinct professions and passions overlap is a world where exaptations thrive."
"Those shared environments often take the form of real world public space, what the sociologist Ray Oldenburg famously called the "third place," a connective environment distinct from the more insular world of home or office. The eighteenth-century English coffeehouse fertilized countless Enlightenment-era innovations; everything from the science of electricity, to the insurance industry, to democracy itself. Freud maintained a celebrated salon Wednesday nights at 19 Berggasse in Vienna, where physicians, philosophers, and scientists gathered to help shape the emerging field of psychoanalysis. Think, too, of Paris cafes where so much of modernism was born; or the legendary Homebrew Computer Club in the 1970s, where a ragtag assemblage of amateur hobbyists, teenagers, digital entrepreneurs, and academic scientists managed to spark the personal computer revolution. Participants flock to these spaces partly for the camaraderie of others who share their passions, and no doubt that support network increases the engagement and productivity of the group. But encouragement does not necessarily lead to creativity. 'Collisions' do--the collisions that happen when different fields of expertise converge in some shared physical or intellectual space." 1920s cafes.
163. Martin Ruef investigated the relationship between business innovation and diversity by interviewing 766 graduates of Stanford Business School. He tracked the number and type of acquantances they had, finding the most creative individuals had broad social networks that extended outside their organization and involved people from diverse fields of expertise. "Diverse, horizontal social networks, in Ruef's analysis, were 'three times' more innovative than uniform, vertical networks. In groups united by shared values and long-term familiarity, conformity and convention tended to dampen any potential creative sparks. The limited reach of the network meant that interesting concepts from the outside rarely entered the entrepreneur's consciousness. But the entrepreneurs who built bridges outside their "islands," as Ruef called them, were able to borrow or co-opt new ideas from these external environments and put them to use in a new context.
164. Ronald Burt. "A similar study, conducted by University of Chicago business school professor named Ronald Burt, looked at the origin of good ideas inside the organizational network of the Raytheon Corporation. Burt found that innovative thinking was much more likely to emerge from individuals who bridged "structural holes" between tightly-knit cluster."
165. Mark Granovetter. "strength of weak ties". Popularized by Malcolm Gladwell in 'The Tipping Point'. "...looking at the weak ties of an extended social network through the lens of exaptation changes the picture in an important way: it is not merely that weak ties allow information to travel throughout a network more efficiently--that is, without becoming trapped on the remote island of a close-knit group. From the perspective of innovation, it's even more important that the information arriving from one of those weak ties is coming from a different context, what the innovation scholar Richard Ogle calls an "idea-space": a complex of tools, beliefs, metaphors, and objects of study. A new technology developed in one idea-space can migrate over to another idea-space through these long-distance connections; in that new environment, the technology may turn out to have unanticipated properties, or may trigger a connection that leads to a new breakthrough. The value of the weak tie lies not just in the speed with which it transmits information across a network; it also promotes the exaptation of those ideas. Gutenberg was trained as a metallurgist, but he had weak ties to the vinters of Rhineland Germany. Without that link, he would have been merely a pioneering typesetter, making an incremental improvement on Pi Sheng's movable type."
166. Rosalind Franklin. biopsysicist at London University. The clearest view of the DNA molecule due to the focus on X-ray tech.
James Watson and Francis Crick. Crick's scupture metaphor was crucial. DNA needed knowledge of various disciplines. Crick switched from physics to biology in his graduate years; neither had a comprehensive grasp of biochemistry."Watson and Crick had to borrow from other domains to make sense of the molecule. As Ogle puts its, "Once key ideas from idea-spaces that otherwise had little contact with one another were connected, they began, quasi-autonomously, to make new sense in terms of one another, leading to the emergence of a whole that was more than the sum of its parts." Watson and Crick would take long coffee breaks to discuss the ideas.
168. Traditional mass production. "The designers come up with a basic look and feature set and then pass it on to the engineers, who figure out how to actually make it work. And then it gets passed along to the manufacturing folks, who figure out how to build it in large numbers--after which it gets sent to the marketing and sales people, who figure out how to persuade people to buy it. This model is so ubiquitous because it performs well in situations where efficiency is key, but it tends to have disastrous effects on creativity, because the original idea gets chipped away at each step in the chain. The engineering team takes a look at the original design and says, "Well, we can't really do that--but we can do 80 percent of what you want." And then the manufacturing team says, "Sure, we can do some of that." In the end, the origianl design has been watered down beyond recognition."
169. Apple method. Called concurrent or parallel production. "All the groups--design, manufacturing, engineering, sales--meet continuously through the product-development cycle, brainstorming, trading ideas and solutions, strategizing over the most pressing issues, and generally keeping the conversation open to a diverse group of perspectives. The process is noisy and involves far more open-ended and contentious meetings than traditional production cycles--and far more dialogue between people versed in different disciplines, with all the translation difficulties that creates. But the results speak for themselves."
170. Great innovators tend to have varied hobbies. Ben Franklin, John Snow, Charles Darwin
171. "That cognitive overlap is what makes this mode so innovative. The current project can exapt ideas from the projects at the margins, make new connections. It is not so much a question of thinking outside the box, as it is allowing the mind to move through multiple boxes. That movement from box to box forces the mind to approach intellectual roadblocks from new angles, or to borrow tools from one discipline to solve problems in another."
172. "Chance favors the connected mind."
177. "Reef-building corals grow in vast colonies, with new polyps appearing as buds on the sides of their "parents." It is one of the strange ironies of marine biology that coral's essential contribution to the undersea ecosystem takes place after its death. The polyp builds a calcium-based exo-skeleton during its life, producing a mineral called aragonite, which is study enough to remain intact centuries after its original host has perished. A coral reef, then, is a kind of vast underwater mausoleum: millions of skeletons united together to form the pocked, labyrinthine sprawl of a reef."
180. "keystone species" a phase in ecology for forty years. Clive Jones added "ecosystem engineers". Like the beaver.
181. "The platform builders and ecosystem engineers do not just open a door in the adjacent possible. They build an entire new floor."
183. Dopler effect to track Sputnik as it sent signal.
184. McClure. project Transit System. Three years after Sputnik, there were five US satellites in orbit, providing navigational data to the military. Today, roughly 30 GPS satellites in orbit in orbit.
185. Guier and Weiffenbach credited the Applied Physics Lab itself than their own particular talents.
186. Similar spaces: Homebrew Computing Club in Silicon Valley; Freud's Wednesday salon at 19 Berggasse; the eighteenth century English coffeehouse. Emergent platforms. Edward Lloyd or William Unwin, coffeehouse proprietors, where much like beavers that happen to ensure an innovative environment.
187. Tim Berners-Lee created HTML based on SGML from IBM in the 1960s, using the existing HTTP channel. Hurley, Chen, and Karim of YouTube used the web, Adobe Flash, and Javascript, allowing end users to embed video on their own sites.
188. YouTube built in six months; HDTV twenty years.
"The field that ultimately explained Darwin's paradox--ecosystems ecology--stands on the shoulders of population genetics, systems theory, and biochemistry, among others."
189. Genius needs genres. "Genres are the platforms and paradigms of the creative world... ...they fade into view, though a complicated set of shared signals passed between artists, each contributing different elements to the mix. The murder mystery has been coherent as a novelistic genre for a hundred years, but when you actually chart its pedigree, it gets difficult to point to a single donor: it's a little Poe, a little Dickens, a little Wilkie Collins"
"Genres are themselves built on top of more stable conventions and technologies." Such as Miles Davies using the valved trumpet to break away from chord-and-improv conventions of bebop jazz in the song "So What?" played in the D Dorian scale.
191."...programs that map other Twitizens who are near to you geographically."
192. API. Application Programming Interface. "An API is a kind of lingua franca that software applications can use reliably to communicate with each other, a set of standardized rules and definitions that allow programmers to build new tools on top of another platform, or to weave together information from multiple platforms. When Web users make geographic mashups using Google Maps, they write programs that communicate with Google's geographic data using their mapping API.
Some APIs reveal only a small subset of a platform's underlying code, in part for simplicity's sake, but also for proprietary reasons. Conventionally, a developer will create a piece of software, and once it's finished, expose a small part of its functionality to outside developers via the API. The Twitter team took the exact opposite approach. They built the API first, and exposed all the data that was crucial to the service, 'and then they built Twitter.com on top of the API'. Conventional software assumes that API users are second-class citizens who shouldn't get full access to the software's secret sauce."
193. Apps for Democracy. Vivek Kundra. 2008 was CTO for the District of Columbia. Now Chief Information Officer for President Obama. Data.gov
195. Post-scarcity. "Those forty-seven apps generated in a month by the original Apps for Democracy contest had a toal cost to the D.C. government of $50,000. Kundra estimated that, had the city government contracted out for those applications using it traditional methods, the cost to the city would have been more than $2,000,000. (Also the process would have taken more than a year.) The same math applies to private-sector Web innovation. If Hurley, Chen, and Karim had been forced to concoct an online video standard fro scratch, it would have taken years and tens of millions of dollars just to get a working beta version online. To this day, Twitter has not spent a dime building a mapping application to track the location of tweets, because dozens of services exist that do exactly that, created and promoted by third parties at zero cost to Twitter itself."
201. Brent Constantz. Growing carbonate cement based on coral reef formation in transport trailers in Los Gatos. Found that production rose 8x when pumped with carbon dioxide
204. The web started as a desert and is steadily transforming into a coral reef.
206. Public resource system. Outside.in "parses the geo-data and detects the name of the restaurant in the tweet, and automatically attaches it to pages that cover all the news and commentary about the Back Bay neighborhood, and pages devoted to the Boston restaurant scene."
208. "Stacked platforms are like that: you think you're fighting the Cold War, and it turns out you're actually helping people figure out where to have lunch.
In a funny way, the real benefit of stacked platforms lies in the knowledge you no longer need to have. You don't need to know how to send signals to satellites or parse geo-data to send that tweet circulating through the Web's tangled bank. Miles Davis didn't have to build a valved trumpet or invent the Dorian D mode to record 'Kind of Blue'. The songbird sitting in an abandoned woodpecker's nest doesn't need to know how to drill a hole into the side of a poplar, or how to fell a hundred-foot tree. That is the generative power of open platforms. The songbird doesn't carry the cost of drilling and felling because the knowledge of how to do those things was openly supplied by other species in the chain. She just needs to know how to tweet."
210. Willis Carrier. Created a dehumidifyer for for the Sackett-Wilhelm printing company and soon made cooling air conditioners.
217. "Berners-Lee needed the open platform of the Internet for his hypertext creation to take flight, and thus the many individuals who built ARPANET and TCP/IP should be understood as essential contributors to the Web. Had those platforms been more proprietary ones--say, by charging licensing fees for the privilege of developing on top of them--it's entirely possible that Berners-Lee wouldn't have bothered creating the Web in the first place, given that it was a side project that his superiors knew next to nothing about."
219. "Distant reading takes the satellite view of the literary landscape, looking for larger patterns in the history of the stories we tell each other. In one typically inventive analysis, Moretti tracked the evoltion of subgenres in popular British novels from 1740 to 1915, an immense taxonomy of narrative forms--spy novels, picaresques, gothic novels, nautical tales, mysteries, and dozens of other distinct forms. For each subgenre, he plotted its life span as a dominant species in the British literary ecosystem."
220. "In the study of scientific or technological innovation, the equivalent of close reading is the meticulous biography of the great inventor, or the history of a single technology: the radio, say, or the personal computer. As valuable as those approaches can be, they have their limitations. Close reading leaves you with the idiosyncrasies of each individual or invention, the local color--but not the general laws. When you view the history of innovation from a distance, what you lose in detail you gain in perspective. Classifying two hundred good ideas into four broad quadants certainly makes it harder to learn anything specific about each individual innovation. But it does allow us to answer the question we began with: What kind of envionments make innovation possible in the first place?"
238. "To my mind, the great question for our time is whether large organizations--public 'and' private, governments 'and' corporations alike--can better harness the innovation turbine of fourth quadrant systems. On the private-sector side, the success of companies like Google and Twitter and Amazon---all of whom have, in different ways, contributed to and benefited from fourth-quadrant innovation--has made it clear that, in the software world, at least, a little openness goes a long way. I suspect those lessons will grow increasingly inescapable in the decades to come. But it is the public sector that I find more interesting, because governments and other non-market interesting, because governments and other non-market instituions have long sufferend 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."
239. Commons. "...perhaps "commons" is the wrong word for the environment we're tryin to imagine, thouh it has a long and sanctified history in intellectual property law. The problem with the trm is twofold. For starters, it has conventionally been used in opposition to the competitive struggle of the marketplace. The original "commons" of rural England disappeared when they were swallowed up by the private enclosures of agrarian capitalism in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Yet the innovation environments we have exploed are not necessarily hostile to competition and profit. More important, however, the commons metaphor doesn't suggest the patterns of recycling and exaptation and recombination that define so many innovation space. When you think of a commons, you think of a cleared field dominated by a single resource for grazing. You don't think of an ecosystem. The commons is a monocrop grasslannd, not a tangled bank."
240. Last four paragraphs. "I prefer another metaphor drawn from nature: the reef. You need only survey a coral reef (or rain forest) for a few minutes to see that competition for resources abounds in this space, as Darwin rightly observed. But that is not the source of its marvelous biodiversity. The struggle for existence is universal in nature. The few residents of a desert ecosystem are every bit as competitive as their equivalents on a coral reef. What makes the reef so inventive is not the struggle between the organisms but the way they have learned to collaborate---the coral and the zooxanthellae and the parrotfish borrowing and reinventing each other's work. This is the ultimate explanation of Darwin's Paradox: the reef has unlocked so many doors of the adjacent possible because of the way it shares.
The reef helps us understand the other riddles we began with: the runaway innovation of cities, and of the Web. They, too, are envionments that compulsively connect and remix that most valuable of resources: information. Like the Web, the city is a platform that often makes private commerce possible but which is itself outside the marketplace. You do business in the big city, but the city itself belongs to everyone. ("City air is free air," as the old saying goes.) Ideas collide, emerge, recombine; new enterprises find homes in the shells abandoned by earlier hosts; informal hubs allow different dissciplines to borrow from one another. These are the spaces that have long supported innovation, from those first Mesopotamian settlements eight thousand years ago to the invisible layers of softwae that support today's Web.
Ideas rise in crowds, as Poincare said. They rise in liquid networks where connection is valued more than protection. So if we want to build environments that generate good ideas--whether those environments are in schools or corporations or governments or our own personal lives--we need to keep that history in mind, and not fall back on the easy assumptions that competitive markets are the only reliable source of good ideas. Yes, the market has been a great engine of innovation. But so has the reef.
Most of us, I realize, don't have a direct say in what macro forms of information and economic organization prevail in the wider society, though we do influence that outcome indirectly, in the basic act of choosing between employment in the private or the public sector. But this is the beauty of the long-zoom perspective: the patterns recur at other scales. You may not e able to turn you goverenment into a coral reef, but you can create comparable environments on the scale of everyday life: in the workplaces you inhabit; in the way you consume media; in the way you augment your memory. The patterns are simple, but followed together, they make for a whole that is wiser than the sum of its parts. Go for a walk; cultivate hunches; write everything down, but keep you 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."