Steven Johnson, Kevin Kelly on Building Off Others’ Ideas and The Adjacent Possibility - MIT Sloan Management Review

“Adjacent Possible” and other ways of thinking about collaboration Here’s how an October 2010 interview in Wired begins: “Say the word ‘inventor’ and most people think of a solitary genius toiling in a basement. But two ambitious new books on the history of innovation — by Steven Johnson and Kevin Kelly, both longtime Wired contributors — argue that great discoveries typically spring not from individual minds but from the hive mind. “In Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation, Johnson draws on seven centuries of scientific and technological progress, from Gutenberg to GPS, to show what sorts of environments nurture ingenuity.

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The Origins of Good Ideas - An Extract from Steven Johnson's New Book "Where Good Ideas Come From"

In the year following the 2004 tsunami, the Indonesian city of Meulaboh received eight neonatal incubators from international relief organizations. Several years later, when an MIT fellow named Timothy Prestero visited the local hospital, all eight were out of order, the victim of power surges and tropical humidity, along with the hospital staff's inability to read the English repair manual. Mr. Prestero and the organization he cofounded, Design That Matters, had been working for several years on a more reliable, and less expensive, incubator for the developing world. In 2008, they introduced a prototype called the NeoNurture. It looked like a streamlined modern incubator, but its guts

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Reading: Is It Being Changed by Technology? - Steven Johnson, NYTimes.com

THE point of books is to combat loneliness,” David Foster Wallace observes near the beginning of “Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself,” David Lipsky’s recently published, book-length interview with him. If you happen to be reading the book on the Kindle from Amazon, Mr. Wallace’s observation has an extra emphasis: a dotted underline running below the phrase. Not because Mr. Wallace or Mr. Lipsky felt that the point was worth stressing, but because a dozen or so other readers have highlighted the passage on their Kindles, making it one of the more “popular” passages in the book. Amazon calls this new feature “popular highlights.” It may sound innocuous enough, but it augurs even bigger changes to come.

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