Chance favours the connected mind

STEVEN JOHNSON is both an original and eclectic thinker. He has looked at innovation from an environmental perspective exploring the spaces that historically have given rise to great surges in innovation. And the central insight in this examination of how ideas happen is that innovation flourishes in connected spaces. But what makes the book fascinating is the sheer sweep of territory he covers to support his core thesis. Johnson draws from the history of science and natural history and art and commerce. The book is dense with examples.

Whether he is looking at biological spaces such as intensely populated coral reefs or the greater incidence of ideas in crowded cities compared to the countryside, the conclusion is the same: spaces where life congregates produce more innovation.

Writing in the Financial Times, Johnson said: ‘Economists have a telling phrase for the kind of sharing that happens in these densely populated environments – “information spillover”. When you share a civic culture with millions of people, good ideas have a tendency to flow from mind to mind, even when their creators try to keep them secret.’

The book also deals with how work environments should be structured to maximise the kinds of connections that collide to produce something new such as open spaces of many creative environments in Silicon Valley. Images of collision pepper the book: half-formed thoughts meeting other half-formed thoughts to produce a whole greater than the sum of its parts is a common pattern of innovation. Johnson calls it the ‘slow hunch’. Other patterns he describes are how networks are formed and nourished, the wonderful unintended consequences of mistakes, the serendipitous discovery and using existing components for an entirely different purpose.

All of this, of course, links to the internet and while he acknowledges the views of its critics – that the internet makes us shallow with shortened concentration and a magpie-like approach to knowledge – its main value as an engine of connectivity excuses everything. ­

Where good ideas come from, Steven Johnson, Riverhead (2010), £12.99