159 Quotes by Steven Johnson

Like every big idea, Birdseye’s breakthrough was not a single insight, but a network of other ideas, packaged together in a new configuration. What made Birdseye’s idea so powerful was not simply his individual genius, but the diversity of places and forms of expertise that he brought together.

We are strangely biased, as individuals and media institutions, to focus on big sudden changes, whether good or bad – amazing breakthroughs, such as a new gadget that gets released, or catastrophic failures, like a plane crash.

The problem is, there are definitely some genuinely lame things on television, and there’s more at the bottom of the barrel, because the barrel in a sense has gotten bigger.

What I’m saying is individuals have better ideas if they’re connected to rich, diverse networks of other individuals. If you put yourself in an environment with lots of different perspectives, you yourself are going to have better, sharper, more original ideas. It’s not that the network is smart.

Her research suggests a paradoxical truth about innovation: good ideas are more likely to emerge in environments that contain a certain amount of noise and error.

Humans had proven to be unusually good at learning to recognize visual patterns; we internalize our alphabets so well we don’t even have to think about reading once we’ve learned how to do it.

If you look at where innovation – defined as ideas, not as commercial product – tends to live, the university system is remarkably innovative.

Diverse, horizontal social networks, in Ruef’s analysis, were three times more innovative than uniform, vertical networks. In groups united by shared values and long-term familiarity, conformity and convention tended to dampen any potential creative sparks.

The first transatlantic line that enabled ordinary citizens to call between North America and Europe was laid only in 1956.