Patterns of Innovation

Recently I finished, Steven Johnson's, Where Good Ideas Come:  The Natural History Of Innovation and I got a lot of information from this book pertaining the patterns of how innovation occurs.  The author first talks about the adjacent possible, which earlier, I blogged about because it intrigued me of what he was saying about how one idea leads to one another like open doors.  Then he followed up that chapter, by discussing how liquid networks are the center of how ideas flow between other people with different ideas.  This particular topic revealed to me that not all good ideas just come from the individual mind, but through other peoples' minds put together as well.  To add, the author speaks on slow hunches being influenced through technological innovation and evolution.  Slow hunches, is a feeling that many people possess, but are not cultivated like they should be.  Johnson also discusses how some of history's greatest ideas have come through serendipity, such as exploring new material on the web that sparked one's mind into coming up with a good idea. Furthermore, Johnson writes about error, which us as humans we are always making, but what really surprised me the most was that many of today's inventions have come from error.  For example, Alexander Fleming only discovered penicillin through a bacteria sample being contaminated by mold.  Thus he studied what had killed the bacteria, causing the discovery of penicillin.  The second to last pattern that the author writes about, is exaptation which describes using an idea for another purpose rather than its original purpose.  Johannes Gutenberg exapted a machine that was used to get people drunk, as a means of creating movable type.  Even natural selection have changed the directions of a bird's feathers to be aerodynamic, therefore, giving them flight advantages.  Johnson, finally, explores the breakthrough of ideas coming from platforms.  Twitter, as an example, derived from technological platforms into what it is today.  So to say the least, this was an interesting book that gave a lot of insight to the patterns of innovation.