Steven Johnson Ideas Quotations

If you look at history, innovation doesn't come just from giving people incentives; it comes from creating environments where their ideas can connect.

What you end up seeing when you look at history is that people who have been good at pushing the boundaries of possibility, and exploring those frontiers of good ideas and innovations, have rarely done it in moments of great inspiration. They don't just have a brilliant breakthrough idea out of nowhere and leap ahead of everyone else.

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.

When it's a sharing and improvisational meeting, where you're riffing off other people's ideas, that actually can be productive.

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

Those that regularly come into contact with people having diverse interests and viewpoints are more likely to come up with innovative ideas.

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.

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

We are often better served by connecting ideas than we are by protecting them.