#####内容简介
“It is one of the great truisms of our time that we live in an age of technological acceleration; the new paradigms keep rolling in, and the intervals between them keep shortening. This acceleration reflects not only the flood of new products, but also our growing willingness to embrace these strange new devices, and put them to use. ”
我们正处于科技加速进步的时代，这一点已经是老生常谈了；新的科学范式不断涌现，每代的范式之间的更
迭间隔也越来越短。这种加速不仅体现在新产品的涌现速度上，也体现在我们接受新事物、应用新事物的意
愿的不断增长中。
“This is a book about the space of innovation. Some environments squelch new ideas; some environments seem to breed them effortlessly. The city and the Web have been such engines of innovation because, for complicated historical reasons, they are both environments that are powerfully suited for the creation, diffusion, and adoption of good ideas. ”
本书主要讲述创新的空间。有些环境会抑制新想法；有些环境则似乎能轻而易举地滋养出新想法。由于各种
复杂的历史原因，城市和网络一直是这样的创新引擎，两者都是特别适合创造、传播和应用好的IDEA。
“Our thought shapes the spaces we inhabit, and our spaces return the favor. The argument of this book is that a series of shared properties and patterns recur again and again in unusually fertile environments.”
我们的想法塑造了我们的居所，而我们的居住空间又会反过来回馈我们。本书主要目的就是揭示各种特别
适合培育新想法的环境所具备的共同的属性和模式，探讨为什么总是此类环境能够不断激发新的想法。
“we need to take the metaphor seriously: the reef ecosystem is so innovative in its exploitation of those nutrient-poor waters because it shares some defining characteristics with actual cities. In the language of complexity theory, these patterns of innovation and creativity are fractal: they reappear in recognizable form as you zoom in and out, from molecule to neuron to pixel to sidewalk.”
“When life gets creative, it has a tendency to gravitate toward certain recurring patterns, whether those patterns are emergent and self-organizing, or whether they are deliberately crafted by human agents.”
“The long-zoom approach lets us see that openness and connectivity may, in the end, be more valuable to innovation than purely competitive mechanisms. ”
“Good ideas may not want to be free, but they do want to connect, fuse, recombine. They want to reinvent themselves by crossing conceptual borders. They want to complete each other as much as they want to compete.”
#####目录（Table of Contents）
- The Adjacent Possible
“Good ideas are like the NeoNurture device. They are, inevitably, 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 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.”
“Nature’s innovations, too, rely on spare parts. Evolution advances by taking available resources and cobbling them together to create new uses.”
“Good ideas are not conjured out of thin air; they are built out of a collection of existing parts, the composition of which expands (and, occasionally, contracts) over time.”
“But the truth is that technological (and scientific) advances rarely break out of the adjacent possible; the history of cultural progress is, almost without exception, a story of one door leading to another door, exploring the palace one room at a time. But of course, human minds are not bound by the finite laws of molecule formation, and so every now and then an idea does occur to someone that teleports us forward a few rooms, skipping some exploratory steps in the adjacent possible. ”
“All of us live inside our own private versions of the adjacent possible. In our work lives, in our creative pursuits, in the organizations that employ us, in the communities we inhabit—in all these different environments, we are surrounded by potential new configurations, new ways of breaking out of our standard routines. ”
“The trick is to figure out ways to explore the edges of possibility that surround you.”
“Part of coming up with a good idea is discovering what those spare parts are, and ensuring that you’re not just recycling the same old ingredients. ”
“The trick to having good ideas is not to sit around in glorious isolation and try to think big thoughts. The trick is to get more parts on the table.”
- Liquid Networks
- The Slow Hunch
- Serendipity
- Error
- Exaptation
- Platforms
#####结论 Conclusion
摘录来自: Steven Johnson. “Where Good Ideas Come From”