I finished this book in November 2024. I recommend this book 7/10.
Why you should read this book:
Diving into where good ideas originate and how innovation has changed since the beginning. How we went from Darwin standing on a shoreline speculating to the open-source mindset of innovation we see today.
Get your copy here.
🚀 The book in three sentences
Innovation builds upon each other. No YouTube could exist until the internet and Adobe Flash existed.
Ideas take time. Walking is a good way to connect different patterns.
In the beginning, one person had an idea. Today, open source is a natural evolution.
✍️ My favorite quotes
As William James put it, "The error is needed to set off the truth, much as a dark background is required for exhibiting the brightness of a picture."
Benjamin Franklin, who knew a few things about innovation himself, said it best: "Perhaps the history of the errors of mankind, all things considered, is more valuable and interesting than that of their discoveries."
📝 My notes and thoughts
P42. Innovations have to go through a set of doors. Things have to be invented before others can. YouTube could not succeed until the internet became mainstream and Flash became available for videos.
P60. The most striking discovery in Dunbar's study turned out to be the physical location where most of the important breakthroughs occurred. With science like molecular biology, we inevitably have an image in our heads of the scientist alone in the lab, hunched over a microscope, and stumbling across a major new finding. However, Dunbar's study showed that those isolated eureka moments were rare. Instead, the most important ideas emerged during regular lab meetings, where a dozen or so researchers would gather and informally present and discuss their latest work. Dunbar writes, "The results of one person's reasoning became the input to another person's reasoning...resulting in significant changes in all aspects of the way the research was conducted." The most productive tool for generating good ideas remains a circle of humans at a table, talking shop.
P95. Chapter summary:
FBI failed to predict 9/11 because they were not able to collect and share enough hunches.
Darwin used a commonplace book. John Locke did, too. See his indexing system here.
Ideas takes time to form. You get a hunch, you might do a bit of research, take a walk or a shower, and time goes and goes.
Think of Google's 20% time for employees to poke at ideas.
P110. One way is to go for a walk. The history of innovation is replete with stories of good ideas that occurred to people while they were out on a stroll. (A similar phenomenon occurs with long showers or soaks in a tub.) The shower or stroll removes you from the task based on a focus on modern life—paying bills, answering emails, helping kids with homework—and deposits you in a more associative state. Given enough time, your mind will often stumble across some old connection that it had long overlooked, and you experience that delightful feeling of private serendipity: Why didn't I think of that before?
P113. In Poincare's language, the deep dive, like the long stroll, detaches the atoms from the wall and puts them in motion. Most of us don't have the luxury of taking deep dive reading sabbaticals, of course, and reading a few thousand pages is not everyone's idea of a fun vacation. But there's no reason why organizations couldn't recognize the value of a reading sabbatical, the way many organizations encourage their employees to take time off to learn new skills. If Google can give its engineers one day a week to work on anything they want, surely other organizations can figure out a way to give their employees dedicated time to immerse themselves in a network of new ideas.
P135. The story of Greatbatch in the summer of 1951, a WWII veteran working at an animal behavior lab where one day, having lunch with two doctors, talking about the importance of regular heartbeats. Five years later, he is working in a lab in Buffalo where he, by mistake, takes the wrong transistor and produces an artificial heartbeat—resulting in the pacemaker being invented.
P138. As William James put it, "The error is needed to set off the truth, much as a dark background is required for exhibiting the brightness of a picture."
P148. Benjamin Franklin, who knew a few things about innovation himself, said it best: "Perhaps the history of the errors of mankind, all things considered, is more valuable and interesting than that of their discoveries."
P148. Mating between animals and humans is nature's way of leaving the door open for change.
P174. Chapter summary:
Gutenberg borrowed items from Chinese letters and the winepress to make the printing press.
Apple uses the coffee house model for innovation. They bring everyone together: manufacturing, marketing, and sales.
P210. Everything is built on platforms. In a funny way, the real benefit of stacked platforms lies in the knowledge you no longer need to have. You don't need to know how to send signals to satellites or parse geo-data to send that tweet circulating through the Web's ecosystem. Miles Davis didn't have to build a valved trumpet or invent the D Dorian mode to record Kind of Blue. The songbird sitting in an abandoned woodpecker's nest doesn't need to know how to drill a hole into the side of a poplar or how to fall a hundred-foot tree. That is the generative power of open platforms. The songbird doesn't carry the cost of drilling because the knowledge of how to do those things was openly supplied by other species in the chain. She just needs to know how to tweet.
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