The book Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation led me to music I had never heard before, a study on entrepreneurs from Stanford University, and another way of using Facebook. And that was just the beginning.
I’ll start with ideas. Where do good ideas come from? According to the author, they don’t materialize in a vacuum. Good ideas, he says, come from the social or informational interactions in diverse and unique settings. He identifies seven “patterns” in which new ideas are formed and backs them up with examples. I haven’t finished, but the take aways so far are leading me on a new journey:
1. You don’t reach Serendip by plotting a course for it. You have to set out in good faith for elsewhere and lose your bearings serendipitously. (A quote by J. Barth, a postmodernist writer)
2.Music. The author shares an example of how diversity in thinking led musicians Eno and Bryne to produce My Life in the Bush of Ghosts:
“Rather than featuring conventional pop or rock singing, most of the vocals are sampled from other sources, such as commercial recordings of Arabic singers, radio disc jockeys, and an exorcist. Musicians had previously used similar sampling techniques, but never before been used “to such cataclysmic effect” as on My Life.”
If you don’t buy the whole album on itunes, at least buy America is Waiting.
3. A study in the late 90s investigated the relationship between business innovation and diversity. The results showed the most creative individuals consistently had broad social networks that extended outside their organization and involved people from diverse fields of expertise.
“Diverse, horizontal social netweorks were three times more innovative than uniform, vertical networks. Groups united by shared values and long-term familiarity, conformity and convention tended to dampen any potential creative sparks.”
4. Which leads me to Facebook, and any social networking site like LinkedIn. Not your friends, but acquaintances. Or people you hardly know because they are in another field or industry than yours. As other studies have shown, building bridges outside your realm of existence, allows you access to new ideas that you can use in a new context. Looking at those “weak ties” of your social network allows information to travel back and forth throughout a network. And it is not just the speed in which ideas and information travels across a network, it is the openness the information from one area triggers a connection that leads to a new breakthrough.
Obviously, I suggest your own journey of serendipity while reading this book.
A recent Tech Crunch article, The Terrible Costs of Patents, created some conflict for me. The jest of the article references the high cost of patenting technology products. Companies like Google and Apple, and start-ups alike, spend exorbitant amount of money to use as or to protect from the weapon “against the rising tide of patent litigation”. But when you realize that technology products, or anything you can think of, comes from the ideas of others. (Read Where Good Ideas Come From, by Stephen Johnson, to help you see the picture.)
Entrepreneurship at UTSA 