Where good ideas come from
This work tracks the history of innovation in the form of the "slow hunch". The author discusses how new ideas form from the scaffolding of older ideas, a phenomenon he describes as the "adjacent possible". Includes delightful figures of how innovative ideas are shifting from one man with a plan for a profit to many minds working for the public good.
Stats for nerds
33recommend
62mentions
48people
2010–2023years
63% recommend37% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Steven Johnson's "Where Good Ideas Come From" is an inspiring video.
- This reads like a summary of „Where good ideas come from“, a book that I‘d recommend if you want to dig deeper and potentially improve your own having-good-ideas game.
- Or another book recommendation from Gates Notes ‘Where Good Ideas Come From” https://www.gatesnotes.com/Books/Where-Good-Ideas-Come-From which argues that some of the most innovative discoveries from history come from exaptation - the application of ideas from one discipline to an unrelated field.
- "Where Good Ideas Come From" is similarly useful in this regard. "To form fresh ideas, it is necessary to explore the adjacent possible, and to have the widest adjacent possible, it is necessary to have the widest list of available ideas for recombination, the biggest list of spare parts available for recombination" ... quoting from my notes.
- Great - i started yesterday using org-roam and got many ideas out of my head. Found it by reading about zettelkasten (in the fabolous "Where good ideas come from - The History of innovation") and DevonThink (which i really miss, not avail for linux) and googled for alternatives
- Tons of books out there, very difficult to sort the wheat from the chaff. The following is what I found useful. Its a mixed bag, academic and coffee table.
- Beveridge W. I. B., 1950, The Art of Scientific Investigation, New York. https://archive.org/details/artofscientifici00beve
A charming and easy-to-read enquiry into how scientists conduct research. Old but (like all good science) still applicable.
Kaufman, J. C., & Sternberg, R. J. (2010). The Cambridge handbook of creativity.
Tons of great material. Section 1, chapter 2 gives a literature review of the topic.
- Johnson. S., 2010, Where Good Ideas Come From, Penguin UK.
Packed with lots of good anecdotes, this is a very accessible book.
- Currey, M. 2013, Daily Rituals: How Artists Work, Knopf. Blog avaiable here: http://dailyroutines.typepad.com/.
This started off as a blog and developed into a wonderful and useful little book. In my opinion, creative rituals are a very under-estimated component of creativity.
- Sternberg, R. J. (2001). What is the common thread of creativity? Its dialectical relation to intelligence and wisdom. American Psychologist.
A very readable 3 page essay.
- Christensen, C. (2013). The innovator's dilemma: when new technologies cause great firms to fail.
Perhaps the most well-known book on this list. It was this book that addressed the idea of 'disruptive innovation'... innovation that completely destroys some businesses, and creates others. He uses the railroad as an example, but clearly the internet falls into this category as well.
- Seelig, T. (2012). inGenius: A crash course on creativity.
This evolved from the course notes from one of the first university courses on the subject of creativity. A bit annoying to navigate (her chapter headings are 'too creative') but it has good stuff.
On top of this, there is almost everything that Edward De Bono wrote (the lateral thinking guru).
