Johnson, S., 2010, Where good ideas come from, Riverhead Books (Penguin USA), New York
- Author : Johnson, S.
- Year : 2010
- Title English : Where good ideas come from
- Publisher : Riverhead Books (Penguin USA)
- Publisher's Location : New York
- ISBN : 978-1-59448-771-2
- Pages : 326
- Comments : p. 9-10 “Several years ago, the theoretical physicist Geoffrey West decided to investigate whether Kleiber’s Law applied to one of life’s largest creations: the superorganisms of human-built cities. Did the ‘metabolism’ of urban life slow down as cities grew in size? Was there an underlying pattern to the growth and pace of life in metropolitan systems? ... West assembled an international team of researchers and advisers to collect data on dozens of cities around the world, measuring everything from crime to household electrical consumption, from new patents to gasoline sales. When they finally crunched the numbers, West and his team were delighted to discover than Kleiber’s negative quarter-power scaling governed the energy and transportation growth of city living. ... But the most fascinating discovery from West’s research came from the data that didn’t obey Kleiber’s Law. West and his team discovered another power law lurking in their immense database of urban statistics. Every datapoint that involved creativity and innovation – patents, R&D budgets, ‘supercreative’ professions, inventors – also followed a quarter-power law in a way that was every bit as predictable as Kleiber’s Law. But there was one fundamental difference: the quarter-power law governing innovation was positive not negative. A city that was ten times larger than its neighbour wasn’t ten times more innovative; it was seventeen times more innovative. A metropolis fifty times bigger than a town was 130 times more innovative.” p.17 “The argument of this book is that a series of shared properties and patterns recur again and again in unusually fertile environments. ... The more we embrace these patterns – in our private work habits and hobbies, in our office environments, in the design of new software tools – the better we will be at tapping our extraordinary capacity for innovative thinking.” p. 21 Analysing innovation at the scale of individuals and organisations - as the standard textbooks do - distorts our view. It creates a picture of innovation that overstates the role of proprietary research and 'survival of the fittest' competition. The long-zoom approach lets us see that openness and connectivity may, in the end, be more valuable to innovation than purely competitive mechanisms.