This article is an excerpt from the Shortform book guide to "Where Good Ideas Come From" by Steven Johnson. Shortform has the world's best summaries and analyses of books you should be reading.
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Do you have a million ideas in your head that seem to go nowhere? Are you looking for fresh ideas to solve specific problems?
Steven Johnson takes us on an exciting exploration of good ideas and novel innovations. For an idea to be good, he says, it must be built upon accumulated knowledge and be put forward at a time when users can conceive of how to use the idea and when the needed resources for the idea are available.
Keep reading to learn how to develop ideas and, ultimately, advance knowledge and society.
How to Develop Ideas
In Where Good Ideas Come From, Johnson discusses how to develop ideas and turn them into innovations. According to Johnson, good ideas don’t just emerge miraculously from nothing. Instead, they build on existing knowledge and ideas. If every writer had to create their own writing system, or if every app developer had to reinvent the internet, we wouldn’t be able to progress as a society and would be stuck with only the most basic ideas. The more we innovate and create, the more we draw on established knowledge to innovate further, enabling us to come up with increasingly advanced ideas.
(Shortform note: In The 5 Elements of Effective Thinking, Edward Burger and Michael Starbird expand on this idea and suggest that studying how an idea has developed over time can help you come up with new ideas. Doing this gives you a better understanding of the idea’s underlying concepts and also leads you to consider innovations for an idea even after it seems to be completed.)
Previous ideas provide platforms of knowledge on which to build. Platforms can be physical—such as a piece of technology like a steam engine or a computer—or conceptual—such as the ideas and knowledge that allowed us to create such technologies. Platforms not only prop up new ideas, but they also provide parameters, or, in the case of the arts, genres. It’s necessary to understand these parameters in order to bend or break them, which allows for greater insight and innovation.
For example, someone writing a book uses a number of different platforms that developed over millennia: the language they’re writing in, the tool they’re using to write (such as a computer or pen and paper), and any previously written works that are informing their current work. That writer may then choose to take parameters from various genres—such as children’s literature, romance, and coming-of-age stories—to create a new genre like young adult literature.
(Shortform note: Consumer needs can also act as a platform for new ideas. Noticing something that consumers need—even if the consumers don’t know they need it—can provide parameters for the development of a new idea, such as its desired function and the context in which it will be used. Experts recommend using empathic design to identify what a consumer needs, which involves observing someone as they use a current product and noticing what could be made easier or better. They suggest that observation works better than methods like surveys because consumers often develop workarounds for design insufficiencies without even noticing.)
Combining or shifting across platforms of knowledge can open up further opportunities for discovery. Johnson gives the example of how scientists figured out Darwin’s Paradox. This paradox was Charles Darwin’s observation that a massive biological system like a coral reef could exist in an ecosystem with very little nutrition and resources. The question of how such a system could exist was solved when scientists from multiple fields, including biology, chemistry, systems, and more, combined their knowledge to discover that a number of different biological platforms work together to recycle resources and nutrients that keep the system alive. This combination of sciences led to a new field called ecosystems ecology.
(Shortform note: Combining platforms in the way Johnson describes is a type of transdisciplinary thinking. This is an extension of multidisciplinarity and interdisciplinarity. Multidisciplinarity refers to approaching a single topic from a variety of perspectives, each of which adds its own distinct understanding or analysis to the topic. Interdisciplinarity also involves multiple perspectives, but instead of viewing them separately, they’re treated as interrelated. Transdisciplinarity connects the disciplines even further, breaking down the boundaries between them to form a cohesive whole—such as a new field of science or a new genre of media.)
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Here's what you'll find in our full Where Good Ideas Come From summary:
- How the world's best inventions grow from minor inklings
- How capitalism negatively impacts innovation
- Why making mistakes is essential to great innovations
