Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation

Author is trying to analyze real forces behind great inventions and business successes.

It turns out most great ideas often comes:

1. in "adjacent possible" space of alternatives.

Charles Babbage being one of the brightest example. He invented computer 100 years before it was actually possible to produce.

This is the reason behind most ideas (from double-entry bookkeeping to general relativity) coming at the same time to many people independently, at the right time, when the world is ready for the idea.

2. much more often in liquid&open network environments — not in the closed labs behind 10 doors, but in spaces where open communication possible. Exposion of innovations after WWW adoption being one of the example.

Information spill-over between people is crucial factor of growing and developing ideas.

3. as a result of slowly growing hunches/intuitions in the backyard of motivated minds.

Though it often seems to innovators themselves like an a-ha moment that makes the difference — it's apparently not.

Mendeleev could afford his ideas about periodic table to grow for many years, as well as Darwin early intuitions. As well as almost all known inventions and scientific breakthroughs.

4. Errors. A great share of ideas where made by or thanks to some sort of mistake. With Fleming's penicillin or Coulomb finding way to India, or de Forest's Audion vacuum tube being just few of many examples.

And usually these mistakes are in the end of a long journey of trials and errors.

5. Serendepity. Most great ideas were born or conceived by accident.

GPS have grown up from initial Soviet Sputnik flying around with 1kHz signals — two american scientists just got curious if they can derive the trajectory of the Sputnik using just doppler effect and their fixed position on the ground.

6. Exaptation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exaptation Often brilliant idea in one area is just a compilation or adaptation of something common in another one.

Gutenberg printing press is the best specimen of a kind. He compiled together spring press popular in winemaking back then, and movable type technology already known and used by ancient chineese among others.

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This book is in general trying to debunk shallow pop culture narrative of a brilliant flashes of genius suddenly visiting some lucky or hard-working "cinderellas" and "live happily ever after" myths.

And it successfully does so.

Behind the scenes of evolution theory, print press, www, computers and many other inventions are described in the book. In somewhat fancy and sophisticated english.