Where Good Ideas Come From

Steven Johnson surveys the history of innovation to identify the recurring conditions that produce breakthrough ideas. He argues that good ideas rarely arrive as solitary flashes of genius and instead emerge from networks, slow hunches, error, recombination, and what he calls the adjacent possible. Ranging from Darwin's notebooks to the coffeehouses of the Enlightenment to open-source software, Johnson shows that the environments most likely to generate breakthroughs are those that let ideas from different fields collide and combine, an argument that runs parallel to Epstein's case for breadth.