About book Dove Nascono Le Grandi Idee. Storia Naturale Dell'innovazione (2011)
Creativity is synonymous of innovation, change, Kuhn's paradigm shift, unexpected problem solving, generation of the new. The engine of creation is proper of nature and life, and it has also accompanied human evolution throughout, as it still does. Many an author, inventors, scientists and artists - who all share the same fundamental drive and intellectual processes - have paused throughout time to try to understand the source of this endless river of excogitations and precipitations, some of which spur large deviations (and black swans) and have profound consequences for living and understanding.Steven Johnson has crafted a balanced and inspiring guide to creativity, whereby he does not limit to present an overview of possibilities or antecedents: he proposes some major notions and elements that can systematically lead to insights and sparks. Here and there, the reader finds anecdotes and curious facts, confessions and also demolitions of myths - all wrapped into a solid framework that encompasses slow hunch, serendipity, errors, exaptations, platforms and liquid networks. The author leads his reasonings, broad connections and extended sets of examples with an ever clear and fluid prose, clean and polished and precise at all places. There is no grand recipe, yet a set of conditions that are statistically supported by track records and suggested to induce surges of activities and realizations. The role of mobility (for interrelation, slow multitasking, multiplicity of interests, weak links to foreign domains of knowledge and expertise - as in the liquid network analogy, embodied in coffeehouses and long walks and proper architecture of working spaces) is always latent, as is the concept of the adjacent possible extolled from Kaufmann's Investigations. There is also space for an appendix that tracks recent inventions in time, and a reasoned bibliography for each of the seven chapters with references to a lot of supplementary readings and original texts. Johnson acknowledges priority of some of the concepts to other authors, yet it presents an inspiring picture which, while far from exhausting the topic (an aim not intended anyway, and certainly far from being ascertained in general), prompts for free thinking and powerful motivation. The final discussion of the transition from ages of individual interest and market economy to networked invention in non-market domains (what he calls the fourth quadrant, not precisely reconducible to either capitalism or communism) is also very interesting as it links to the growing impact of the world wide web on shift in attitudes in contemporary life.I was suggested the book by Daniel Dennett through one of is tweets, and I hereby decidedly replicate the recommendation. The subtitle of this book, "The Natural History of Innovation," goes a long way in explaining the premise of the book and its defense. The author presents lucid argument and anecdotes to explain the flow of innovation throughout history since Gutenberg.How do good ideas come about and what is the mechanism that brings some ideas and invention to fruition and other ideas to the dustbin of history? The book answers that question.I have added Steven Johnson's other books to my reading list as a result of reading this.
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Well researched,informative and persuasive. Excellent read
—syn
the publisher of the bookcritical thinking
—EmilyPallis
