Where good ideas come from? - The Natural History of Innovation -	Cat: ICT Pub: 2010 #: 1904b
	Steven Johnson	19308u

Title	Where good ideas come from?	良いアイデアはどこから来るのか
Index	Reef, City, Web: The adjacent possible: Liquid networks: The slow hunch: Serendipity: Error: Exaptation: Platforms: The fourth quadrant:	珊瑚礁, 街, Web: 隣接可能性: 流動的ネットワーク: 緩慢な直感: セレンディピティ: 誤謬: 外適応: プラットフォーム: ４番目の象限:
Key	; Act of Creation; Adjacent possible; API; Chaos mode; City air is free air; Commons of reef; Distant reading; Dream inspiration; Edge of Chaos; Fail faster; Innovation Time Off; Kevin Dunbar; Migration to Q-Ⅳ; Open database of hunches; Phase-lock mode; Platforms; Secrecy with cost; William Hogarth;

Résumé

Remarks

>Top 0. Reef, City, Web: 1650: The first coffee shop, the Grand Cafe, was opened in Oxford; coffee is better than alcohol and water; has contributed to develop intellectual creation and enlightenment for 500 years. It also gives architecture of space, where ideas from different background can be exchanged. Environment like a reef and a tropical forest also furnish better environment for biological innovation. These environments could be commonly applicable to our life patterns, or how to make creative organization. Even digital world like Internet and Web, or media environment can prepare similar intellectual spaces for us. There are rich vocabulary to express the moment of creation; such as flash, stroke, epiphany, Eureka, lightbulb; which suggest creation of ideas could not be a single thing. An ideas may arise as a network inside in our brain as a new configuration of network.

0. 珊瑚礁, 街, Web: epiphany: manifestation of Christ

>Top 1. The adjacent possible: How to supply effective incubators for infants in developing world?: even if latest machine were supplied, after probably two years, there would be no maintenance, because there is neither supply system nor engineers of the machine there. Temperature regulation should be critical for keeping infants alive; device employed for warming newborns. Sleeper hit of the child hatchery; now with high oxygen therapy after WWII, triggering 75% decline in infant mortality between 1950-1998. In developing countries: to make an incubator out of parts already existing in the developing world; i.e., out of automobile parts, using local knowledge of automobile repair shops. ideas are works of bricolage. The Web explored the adjacent possible of its medium far faster than any other communications technology in history. Good ideas are not conjured out of thin air; they are built out of a collection of existing parts. Breakthrough ideas as sudden acceleration on the time line. A genius jumps ahead 50 years and invents something that normal minds couldn't possibly have come up with.

1. 隣接可能性: adjacent possible: 隣接可能性; <Stuart Kauffmanの自己組織化理論 obstetrician: childbirth, <obstetrics stumble: mistake sleeper hit: big success without promotion arguably: may be argued detritus: waste or debris ossify: turn into bone; stagnate bricolage: DIY, 間に合わせ jigger: rearrange or tamper with cobble: roughly assemble unleash: release from a leash conjure: cause to appear by magic ritual Innovationを考える有効な手段 Tool: 専門家: 道具の発明→時間節約 Combination: Technologyは組合せ進化の産物; <Schumpeter; innovation=new combination Adjacent possible: 組合せは段階的に発生; ideaは間に合わせ(bricolage)の成果; 未来の影、地図の縁に止まっている; 新たな組合が新たな隣接可能性を生む; 発明の多重性

>Top 2. Liquid Networks: A good idea is a network: A specific constellation of neurons fire in sync with each other in your brain. It is said that our brain has 100B neurons, each of which has 1K connections; consequently an adult human brain contains 100T distant neuronal connections. Compare that 40B pages of the Web, having 10 links per page; which will produce 400B connections at most. Furthermore the network is plastic, capable of adopting new configurations. The question is how to push your brain toward those more creative networks. Networks of ideas or people that mimic the neural networks of a mind exploring the boundaries of the adjacent possible. Life would be impossible without the carbon atom. Carbon has four valence electrons in the outermost shell of the atom. Carbon is uniquely talented at forming connections with other atoms, particularly with H, N, O, P, S, and with other C atoms. These six atoms make up 99% of the dry weight of all living organism on earth. C atoms measure only 0.03% of the earth's crust, and yet make up nearly 20% of our body mass. Stanley L. Miller, et al. early conditions of the prebiotic earth: $CH_4, NH_3, H_2, H_2O$ Silicon lacks Carbon's unique versatility, the ability to form the double and triple bonds that create long chains and rings of fatty acids and sugars. Silicon also requires far more energy to form bonds than carbon does. Silicon bonds readily dissolve in water. Medium of liquid water: Hydrogen bonds that form between distinct water molecules are about 10 items stronger than equivalent bonds in normal liquids. Water remains in liquid form is much larger than other substance. Combination of water's fluidity and solubility makes it marvelously adept at crating new networks of elements. Strength of hydrogen bonds means that new combinations with some stability to them. Life's creativity begins with a liquid, high-density network: connection-hungry carbons colliding with other elements in the primordial soup. >Top Edge of chaos: the fertile zone between too much order and too much anarchy. Behavior of molecules: in a gas: chaos rules, constantly being disrupted and torn apart. in a solid; the patterns have stability, in cable of change. in a liquid: creates more promising environment for the system to explore the adjacent possible. New configurations can emerge through random connections formed between molecules. Spillover is the right word; it captures the essential liquidity of information in dense settlements. >Top 1990s Kevin Dunbar uncovered: His research style was closer to Big Brother; he set up cameras in four leading molecular biology laboratories and recorded as much of the the action. A set of interactions that consistently led to important breakthroughs during lab conversations. Lots of researchers with different ideas and background exchange views and opinions at the labs meeting. People discuss freely, and chaotic environment with unpredictable collisions occur. the most productive tool for generating good ideas remains a circle of humans at a table, talking shop. Microsoft Building 99: All the office spaces are modular, easily reconfigured. Most walls are write-on/write-off, you can quickly sketch out an idea. Open mixer stations where employees gather to share ideas or gossip. Spillover is the right word; it captures the essential liquidity of information in dense settlements. Renaissance: The connection between the artistic and scientific flowering the Renaissance and the formation of early merchant capitalism in the region. 1492 Double-entry method. The double-entry accounting illustrates a key principle in the emergence o markets. A society organized around marketplaces, instead of castles or cloisters.

2. 流動的ネットワーク: chaos: complete disorder and confusion cloister: convent or monastery >Top 1755 William Hogarth: An Election Entertainment A space where information spillover; rooms expanding and contracting to meet their needs.

>Top 3. The slow hunch: 1838/9/28 Darwin hit upon the idea for his theory of natural selection. In the months before the Malthus reading, Darwin had the idea of natural selection in hi head, but at the same time was in capable of fully thinking it. We can track the evolution of Darwin's ideas with such precision because he adhered to rigorous proactive of maintaining notebooks. In 1652 John Locke first began maintaining a commonplace book during his first year at Oxford. Over the next decade he developed and refined an elaborate system for indexing the book's content. Each rereading of the commonplace book becomes a new kind or revelation. You see the evolutionary paths of all your past hunches; the ones that turned out to be red herrings; the ones that turned out to be too obvious to write. >Top Innovation Time Off: Google famously instituted a 20% time program of all Google engineers; for every four hours they spend working on official company projects, the engineers are required to spend one hour on their own pet project, guided entirely by their own passions and instincts. Most engineers end up drifting from idea to idea, and the vast majority of those ideas never turn into an official Google products. But AdSense was partially generated during 20% time. (eventually earned $5B) Over 50% of Google's new products derive from Innovation Time Off hunches.

3. 緩慢な直感: hunch: a feeling on intuition Connecting vs. Protecting 1957 Sputnik: 20MHz easily traceable; exact trajectory Gai Weitenberg Tracking location: discovery of idea of GPS

>Top 4. Serendipity: Dream inspiration: 1865 Friedrich August Kekulé von Stradonitz had a daydream that the serpent from Greek mythology that devours its own tail. The serpent image in his dream gave him a sudden insight into the molecular structure of benzene. 1907 Russian scientist Dmitri Mendeleev created the periodic table of the elements after a dream suggested that the table could be ordered by atomic weight. 1947 John Carew Eccles originally conceived his theory of synaptic inhibitory action, how connected neurons can fire without triggering an endless cascade of brain activity. Eccles's initial hunch involved a purely electrical system, but later experiments proved that the chemical GABA (Gamma AminoButyric Acid) was central to synaptic inhibition. REM Sleep: During REM sleep acetylcholine releasing cells in the brain stem fire indiscriminately, sending surges of electricity billowing out across the brain. Memories and associations are triggered in a chaotic, semi-random fashion, creating the hallucinatory quality of dreams. In a sene, drams are the mind's primordial soup: the medium that facilitates the serendipitous collisions of creative insight. >Top Phase-lock mode and Chaos mode: 2007 Robert Thatcher found that the noise periods lasted for 55 ms, he also detected statistically significant variation among the children. Some brains had a tendency to remain longer in phase-lock, others had noise interval that regularly approached 60 ms. the more disorganized your brain is, the smarter you are. Science does not yet have a solid explanation for the brain's chaos states. The phase-lock mode is where the brain executes an established plan or habit. The chaos mode is where the brain assimilates new information, explores strategies for responding to a changed situation; the chaos mode is a kind of background dreaming. >Top Secrecy comes with great cost: Protecting ideas from copycats and competitors also protects them from other ideas that might improve them. Some forward-thinking companies to turn their R&D labs inside out and make them far more transparent than the traditional model. Brainstorm session: brainstorming is less effective that is practitioners would like. it is finite in both time and space. too often the relevant hunches aren't in sync with one another. >Top Open database of hunches: a public hunch database makes every passing idea visible to everyone else in the organization, not just management. Other employees can comment or expand on those ideas, connecting them with their own hunches. Google rated on a scale of 0 (dangerous or harmful) to 5 (great idea!) Salesforce.com maintains a popular Idea Exchange where its customers can suggest new features for the company's software products. By making the ideas public, and by ensuring that they remain stored in the database, these systems create an architecture for organization serendipity.

4. セレンディピティ: serendipity: occurrence of events by chance in a happy way pedestrian story: lacking inspiration copycat: a person who copies another's behavior inside-out: with inner surface turned outwards phase-lock: fix the frequency of (an oscillator)

>Top 5. Error: Natural selection has gravitated toward a small but stable error rate in DNA transcording tuned the error rate to the optimal balance between too much mutation and too much stability. Our cells appear to be designed to leave the door for mutation ever so slightly open. Parents who made perfect copied of their germ cells would have healthier offspring, while parents with faulty DNA repair would have fewer surviving offspring, thanks to their higher mutation rates. Sexual reproduction: One of the key advantages to sexual reproduction is that it enables mutated genes to break off from the gens that produce higher rates of mutation. Most of those mutations will be inconsequential or downright lethal, but one day it hits the jackpot and stumbles across a mutation that increases its reproductive fitness. >Top fail faster: Innovative environments thrive on useful mistakes, and suffer when the demand of quality control overwhelm them. It's not that mistakes are the goal - they're still mistakes, after all, which is why you want to get through them quickly. But those mistakes are an inevitable step on the path to true innovation. Benjamin Franklin said: "Perhaps the history of the the errors of mankind, all things considered, is more valuable and interesting than that of their discoveries." Truth is uniform and narrow; it constantly exists, and does not seem to require so much an active energy, as a passive aptitude of soul in order to encounter it. But error is endlessly diversified.

5. 誤謬: gravitate: move towards or be attracted to foolproof: incapable to going wrong or being misused thrive: grow or develop well or vigorously overwhelm: have a strong emotional effect fail faster: 早く多く失敗することが成功の秘訣 jackpot: a large cash prize in a game or lottery

>Top 6. Exaptation: Exapation: 1971 essay by Stephen Jay Gould and Elisabeth Vrba: An organism develops a trait optimized for a specific use, but then the trait gets hijacked for a completely different function. Bird feathers: initially evolved fore temperature regulation, helping nonflying dinosaurs from the Cretaceous period insulate themselves against cold weather. Archaeopteryx: began experimenting with flight, feathers turned out to be useful for controlling the air flow over the surface of the wing, allowing those first birds to glide. a tool sculpted by evolutionary pressures for one purpose turns out to have an unexpected property that helps the organism survive in a new way. the vane on one side of the central shaft is larger than the vane on the opposite side. This lest the feather act as a kind of airfoil, providing lift during the flapping of wings. Birds that fly at unusually high velocities, like hawks, have more extreme asymmetries than slower birds. History of human creativity abounds with exaptations. early 1800s, Joseph-Marie Jacquard developed the first punch cards to weave complex silk patterns with mechanical looms. Punch cards would remain crucial to programmable computers until 1970s. In evolutionary terms, the vacuum tube was originally adapted to make signals louder, but it was eventually exapted to turn those signals into information; zeros and ones that could be manipulated in astonishing ways. 17,000 vacuum tubes inside ENIAC, doing the math on the physics of a hydrogen bomb. History of WWW is a story of continuous exaptation. Tim Berners-Lee designs the original protocols with a specifically academic environment in mind, creating a platform for sharing research in a hypertext format. A platform adapted for scholarship was exapted for shopping, and sharing photos, and watching pornography. >Top The Act of Creation: All decisive events in the history of scientific thought can be described in terms of mental cross-fertilization between different disciplines. Concepts from one domain migrate to another as a kind of structuring metaphor, thereby unlocking some secret door that had long been hidden from view. Cities: are environments that are ripe for exaptation, because they cultivate specialized skills and interests, and they create a liquid network where information can leak out of those subcultures, and influence their neighbors in surprising ways. Encouragement or Collisions: Encouragement does not necessarily lead to creativity. Collisions do - the collisions that happen when different fields of expertise converge in some shaped physical or intellectual space. The's where the true sparks fly. The modernism of 1920s exhibited o much cultural innovation in such a short period of time because the writers, poets, artists, and architects were all rubbing shoulders at the same cafés.

6. 外適応: exaptation: 外適応 <ex+adaptation; process of acquring functions, like bird's feather

>Top 7. Platforms: Coral colonies: Eventually the summit of the mountain slides into the sea, leaving a circle of shallow water defined by the periphery of the volcanic crater. the mountain is subsiding so slowly, the coral are able to build their reefs faster than the mountain can descent. full diversity of reef ecosystems have been foiled by the complexity of these habitats.; between a million and ten million distant species live in coral reefs, despite those reefs only occupy 0.1% of the planet's surface. Darwin's Paradox: such nutrient-poor water could generate so much marvelous, improbable, heterogeneous life. WWW: The Web can be imagined as a kind of archaeological site, with layers upon layers of platforms buried beneath every page. Tim Berners-Lee was able to design a new medium because he could freely build on top of the open protocols of the Internet platform. All he had to do was build a standard framework for describing HTML. Even HTML was based on SGML developed at IBM in 1960s. YouTube Hurley, Chen, and Karim created YouTube from three different platforms: Web, Adobe's Flash, and Javascript, which allowed end users to embed video clips on their own sites. Three guys could build YouTube in six months, while it took 20 years to make HDTV. Twitter: Jack Dorsey, Evan Williams, and Biz Stone created Twitter, using 140-character limit of SMS mobile communications platform. Twitter platform is that vast majority of its users interact with the service via software created by third parties. >Top API (Application Programming Interface): is a kind of lingua franca that software applications can use reliably to communicate with each other. Geographic mashups using Google Maps, they write programs that communicate with Google's geographic data using their mapping API. Apps for Democracy suggests is a more open-ended idea: some of the best ideas for government are likely to come from the government. >Top Platforms: Emergent platforms can dramatically reduce the costs of creation. Platforms have a natural appetite for trash, waste, and abandoned goods. Supermarkets and shoe stores often go into new buildings; good book stores and antiques dealers seldom do. Real benefit of stacked platforms lies in the knowledge you no longer need to have. The songbird sitting in a abandoned woodpecker's nest doesn't need to know how to drill a hole into the die of a poplar. 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.

7. プラットフォーム: platform: a raised level surface on which people or things can stand;

>Top 8. The Fourth Quadrant You can dive deeply into a single story and try to persuade your audience as a larger societal truth. The advantage of this approach is to examine a case study in exhaustive detail. The disadvantage is that your audience has to take it on faith that the case study chose is indeed representative of a wider truth. The second approach is to build an argument around dozens of anecdotes, drawn from different contexts and historical periods. The anecdotal approach sacrifices detail for breadth. It runs the risk of being accused of cherry-picking. The Quadrants: The first quadrant correlating to the private corporation or solo entrepreneur. The second to a marketplace where multiple private firms interact. The third to the amateur scientist or hobbyist who shares ideas freely. The fourth corresponds to open-source or academic environments, where ideas can be built upon and reimagined in large, collaborative networks. Which quadrant has the most impressive track record for generation good ideas? It is in the nature of good ideas to stand on the shoulders of the giants who came before them; every important innovation is fundamentally a network affair. Gutenberg and Berners-Lee get classified on the individual side of the spectrum. >Top Distant reading: On the contrary, 'closed reading' is analyzed in exhaustive detail. It is meticulous biography of the great inventor, or the history of a single technology. Most innovation clusters in the third quadrant: non-market individuals. It is too hard to share ideas when the printing press are still novelties, and there is not enough incentive to commercialize those ideas without a robust marketplace of buyers and investors. Renaissance period marks the birth of the modern notion of the innovative genius who sees beyond the horizon that limits his contemporaries - da Vinci, Copernicus, or Galileo. Few innovations that did emerge out of networks; the portable, spring-loaded watches appeared in Nuremberg in 1480, the double-entry bookkeeping system developed by Italian merchants. >Top Migration to Q-Ⅳ (Fourth Quadrant): Solo, amateur innovation (Q-Ⅲ) surrenders much of its lad to the rising power of Q-Ⅳ: The most dramatic change lies along the horizontal axis, in a mass migration from individual breakthroughs to the creative insights of the group. Less than 10% of innovation during the Renaissance is networked. Two centuries later, a majority of breakthrough ideas emerge in collaborative environments. Gutenberg's press, and Postal systems Europe; population densities increase in the urban centers; coffeehouses and formal institutions like the royal Society create new hubs for intellectual collaboration. Many of those innovation hubs exist outside the marketplace; the great minds of the periods had little hope of financial reward for their ideas. A vertical movement toward market incentives is noticeable, nonetheless. As industrial capitalism arises in England in 18C, new economic structure raise the stakes for commercial ventures. English paten laws in early 18C. Explosion of Q-Ⅳ activity: Why have so many good ideas flourished in Q-Ⅳ, despite the lack of economic incentives? Economic incentives have a much more complicated relationship to the development of good ideas. If ideas were fully liberated, then entrepreneurs wouldn't be able to profit from their innovations. And so where innovation is concerned, we have deliberately built inefficient markets. That deliberate inefficiency doesn't exit in Q-Ⅳ. Their openness creates other, powerful opportunities for good ideas to flourish. All other things being equal, financial incentives will indeed spur innovation. When you introduce financial rewards into a system, barricades an secrecy emerge, making it harder for the open patterns of innovation to work their magic. So the question is: what is the right balance? Most academic research today is Q-Ⅳ in its approach. Academics are paid salaries, and successful ideas can led to much-sought-after tenured professorships, but economic rewards are minuscule. Q-Ⅳ innovation has been assisted by another crucial development; the increased flow of information. It is much harder to stop information from spilling over than it is to get it into circulation. The consequence of this is the private-sector firms who are intent on protecting their intellectual assets have to invest time and money in building barricades of artificial scarcity. Q-Ⅳ participants don't have those costs; they can concentrate on coming up with new ideas, not building fortresses around the old ones. Past five centuries from the long view: Market-based competition has no monopoly on innovation; the ideas themselves come from somewhere else. Q-Ⅳ environments have played an immensely important role in m¥nurturing and circulation of good idea. The tire-to-sandals principle: the wheel of quirky ad unpredictable function shift is the major source of what we call progress at all scales. the fact that the good idea of converting tires into sandals can be passed from cobble to cobbler by simple observation, with no licensing agreements to restrict the flow. >Top Commons of reef: For starters, commons have conventionally been used in opposition to the competitive struggle of the market place. I prefer another metaphor drawn from nature: the reef. Competition for resources abound in this space, as Darwin rightly observe. The struggle for existence is universal in nature. what makes the reef so inventive is not the struggle between the organisms but the way they have learned to collaborate - the coral and the zooxanthellae and the parrotfish borrowing and reinventing each other's work. The reef has unlocked so many doors of the adjacent possible because of the way it shares. >Top The reef helps us understand the other riddles we began with; the runaway innovation of cities and the Web. City air is free air. Ideas collide, emerge, recombine; new enterprises find homes in the shells abandoned by earlier hosts; informal hubs allow different disciplines to borrow from one another. Poincaré said that ideas rise in crowds. They rise in liquid networks where connection is valued more than protection. You may not be able to turn your government into a coral reef, but you can create comparable environments on the scale of everyday life. the patterns are simple, but followed together, they make for a whole that is wiser than the sum of its parts.

8. 第４の象限: cusp: a point of transition between two states cherry-picking: selectively choose anchor tenant: key tenant subjectivity: qualtiy of existing in personal feelings well-to-do: wealthy suffocate: die from lack of air much-sought-after: 引っ張りだこ minuscule: extremely small greed-is-good: 強欲を良しとする sink-hole: a cavity in the ground; cave zooxanthella, -llae: 褐虫藻 The Fourth Quadrant:

Ⅰ. Market/Individual: Mason Jar; Tesla Coil; Gatling Gun; Nylon; Vulcanized Rubber; Programmable Computer; Revolver; Dynamite; AC Motor; Air Conditioning; Transistor; Ⅱ. Market/Network: Airplane; Steel; Induction Motor; Contact Lenses; Moving Assembly Line; Locomotive; Electric Motor; Refrigerator; Telegraph; Sewing Machine; Elevator; Steel; Typewriter; Plastic; Calculator; Internal Combustion; Engine; Bicycle; Telephone; Lightbulb; Automobile; Radio; Welding Machine; Motion Picture Camera; Vacuum Cleaner; Washing Machine; Vacuum tube; Helicopter; Television; Photography; Jet Engine; Tape Recorder; Laser; VCR; Personal Computer; Bicycle Ⅲ. Non-market/Individual: Spectroscope; Bunsen Burner; Rechargeable Battery; Nitroglycerine; Liquid Engine Rocket; Uncertainty Principle; Electrons in Chemical Bonds; Absolute Zero; Atomic Theory; Stethoscope; Uniformitarianism; Cell Nucleus; Benzene Structure; Heredity; Natural Selection; X-Rays; Blood Groups; Hormones; $E=mc^2$; Special Relativity; Earth's Core; Radiometric Dating; Cosmic Radiation; General Relativity; Universe Expanding; Ecosystem; Double Helix; CT Scan; Archaea; World Wide Web; Continental Drift; Superconductors; Neutron; Early Life Simulated Ⅳ. Non-market/Network: Braille; Periodic Table; RNA Splicing; Chloroform; EKG; Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation; Aspirin; Cell Division; Global Warming; MRI; Enzymes; Cell Differentiation; DNA Forensics; Stratosphere; Radioactivity; Plate Tectonics; Cosmic Rays; Electron; Atomic Reactor; Modern Computer; Mitochondria; Nuclear Forces; Artificial Pacemaker; Vitamins; Oral Contraceptive; Radiocarbon Dating; Neurotransmitter; Graphic interface; Genes on Chromosomes; Endorphins; Chemical Bonds; Restriction Enzymes; Infant Incubator; Radiography; Gamma-Ray Bursts; Oncogenes; Penicillin; Universe Accelerating; Atoms Form Molecules; Quantum Mechanics; Punch Cards; Radar; GPS; Suspension Bridge; Liquid-Fueled Rocket; Second Law; DNA as Genetic Material; Internet; Anesthesia; Krebs Cycle; RNA as Genetic Material; Germ Theory; Computer; Asteroid K-T Extinction

Comment

There is no proper word or term to express innovation; which is essentially 'making newness'; there is no word to describe new things or new ways, because the word is always old and historical. The refutation may come from unexpected viewpoint: if we selected something most innovative among three alternatives, the objection would come from the fourth viewpoint which we hadn't noticed yet.

イノベーションをうまく表現する適切な言葉はそもそも存在しない。それは新たなことだからである。言葉は常に古く歴史的なものだから、新たな事柄や方法を表現する言葉はない。 反論は意外な見解からやってくる。我々が３つの選択肢の中から最もイノベーティブなことを選択したとしても、反論は気づかない４番目の視点からやってくる。