I read a great book about the history of innovation and invention on my flight back from Cambodia. It’s called Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation, and it’s by Steven Johnson.
The book is a synthesis of historical innovative thinking, covering a broad array of topics ranging from theories such as natural selection, to the gradual development of technologies such as GPS.
Johnson dispels the common myth that most innovations are thought up behind closed doors by brilliant people who are ahead of their times, and goes to great lengths to demonstrate that the majority of useful ideas throughout history were developed very slowly, building incrementally off of existing ideas, often in collaboration with large groups of people from diverse backgrounds. He talks about why densely populated cities are much more likely to generate new ideas than small towns, and why some innovations take decades to be transformed from an idea into something useful, while others are immediately adopted and expanded upon.
I found the most interesting part of the book to be the notion of the “adjacent possible”:
“Good ideas are…constrained by the parts and skills that surround them. We have a natural tendency to romanticize breakthrough innovations, imagining momentous ideas transcending their surroundings, a gifted mind somehow seeing over the detritus of old ideas and ossified tradition. But ideas are the 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.
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 it is not an infinite space, or a totally open playing field. The number of potential first-order reactions is vast, but it is a finite number…What the adjacent possible tells us is that at any moment the world is capable of extraordinary change, but only certain things can happen.
The strange and beautiful truth about the adjacent possible is that its boundaries grow as you explore those boundaries. Each new combination ushers new combinations into the adjacent possible. Think of it as a house that magically expands with each door you open. You begin with 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.”
Good stuff. It’s an insightful read, and I highly recommend it if you find this topic interesting.