One lovely consequence of Kleiber's law is that the number of heartbeats per lifetime tends to

be stable from species to species

http://www.flickr.com/photos/archetypefotografie/3632454965/lightbox/

“Great cities are not like town only larger”Jane Jacobs.The average resident of a metropolis with a population of five

million is almost three times more creative than the average resident of a small town

http://www.flickr.com/photos/mikebehnken/5102846536/

Nature's innovations rely on spare parts. Evolution advances by taking available resources and cobbling them together to create new uses. Our bodies are also works of

bricolage, old parts strung together to form something radically new.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/douga/225131469/

Stuart Kauffman has a suggestive name for first-order combinations: “the adjacent possible”. The strange and

beautiful truth is that its boundaries grow as you explore those boundaries. Each new combination ushers new

combinations into the adjacent possible.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/kevenlaw/2941995444/

The trick is to figure out ways to explore the edges of possibility that

surround you.

Innovative environments are better at helping their inhabitants explore the

adjacent possible, because they expose a wide and diverse sample of spare parts (mechanical or conceptual) and they

encourage novel ways of recombining them.

A good idea is a network. A specific constellation of neurons (thousands of them) fire in sync with each

other and an idea pops into consciousness. A new idea is a network of cells exploring the adjacent possible of

connections that they can make in your mind.http://www.flickr.com/photos/28634332@N05/4128229979/

An idea is not a single thing. It is more like a swarm.http://www.flickr.com/photos/onkel_wart/4256435917

“Primordial soup”: an environment where novel combinations could occur thanks to: a capacity to make

new connections with as many other elements as possible (Carbon); and a randomising environment that encourages

collisions between all the elements in the system (H20).http://www.flickr.com/photos/dexxus/5491134733/

Interconnections nurture great ideas, because most great ideas come into the world half-baked, more hunch than

revelation. Most great ideas have the seeds of something profound, but they lack a key element that can turn the

hunch into something truly powerful.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/ecstaticist/3503888462

Most hunches that turn into innovations unfold over long time frames. Because they need so much time to develop, they are fragile creatures, easily lost to the more pressing

needs of day-to-day issueshttp://www.flickr.com/photos/nickwheeleroz/2475011402

Part of the secret of hunch cultivation is simple: write everything down

Reading remains an unsurpassed vehicle for the transmission of interesting new ideas and perspectives.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/nickwheeleroz/2475011402

If Google can give its engineers one day a week to work on anything they want, surely other organisations can

figure out a way to give their employees dedicated time to immerse

themselves in a network of ideas

Marissa Mayer at Stanford University: Google's Innovation Time Offhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=soYKFWqVVzg

The serendipity of the Web suggest a directive: look everything up!

http://www.devon-technologies.com/products/devonthink/

http://about.digg.com/

http://del.icio.us/

http://www.evernote.com/

The secret to organisational inspiration is to build information networks that allow hunches to persist and

disperse and recombine

http://www.flickr.com/photos/paulobrandao/2788050844/

A paradoxical truth about innovation: good ideas are more likely to emerge in environments that

contain a certain amount of noise and error

http://www.flickr.com/photos/pyth0ns/4667845646/

No parents want genetic mutations in their child. But as species, we have been dependent on mutation

http://www.uliwestphal.110mb.com/mutatoes.html

The mutation rate in human germ cells is roughly one in thirty million base pairs, which means each time parents

pass their DNA on to a child, that genetic inheritance comes with roughly 150 mutations.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/pagedooley/2422430207

Big organisations like to follow perfectionist regimes like Six Sigma and Total Quality

Management... But leaving some room for generative error is important, too. Innovative

environments thrive on useful mistakes

Exaptation: an organism develops a trait optimised for a specific use, but then the trait gets hijacked for a completely different function. Feathers adapted for warmth, exapted for

flight.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/ac_theart/4834301008

In the early 1800s, a weaver named Joseph-Marie Jacquard developed the first punch cards to weave complex solk patterns with mechanical looms. Several decades later, Charles Babbage borrowed Jacquard's

invention to program the Analytical Engine. Punch cards would remain crucial to programmable computers until the 1970s.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/ian-s/2152798588/

“All decisive events in the history of scientific thought can be described in terms of mental cross-fertilisation

between different disciplines” Arthur Koestler

“The larger the town, the more likely it is to contain in meaningful numbers and unity, drug addicts, radicals, intellectuals, swingers,

health-food faddists, or whatever; and the more likely they are to influence (as well as offend) the conventional center of society”

Claude Fischer

http://www.flickr.com/photos/bdebaca/458957022

“In groups united by shared values and long-term familiarity, conformity and convention tend to dampen any potential creative sparks. But people who build bridges outside their islands, are able to borrow or co-opt new ideas from external environments and put them to use in a new context”

Martin Ruef

http://www.flickr.com/photos/pcharlon/4241943716/

A new technology developed in one idea-space can migrate to another idea-space through long-distance connections; in that new environment,

the technology may turn out to have unanticipated properties or may trigger a connection that leads to a new breakthrough

http://www.flickr.com/photos/raneko/3198405581

Platform building is, by definition, a kind of exercise in emergent behaviour”

http://www.flickr.com/photos/pcharlon/4241943716/

The Origins of GPShttp://www.gpsworld.com/gnss-system/gps-modernization/the-origins-gps-part-1-9890?page_id=2

Genres are the platforms and paradigms of the creative world. They are almost never willed into existence by a single pioneering work. Genres

are built on top of moew stable conventions and technologies.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/maistora/3208077240

The most fascinating thing about Twitter is how much has been built on top of its platform. When it first emerged, Twitter was widely derided as a frivolous distraction that was mostly good for telling your friends what you had for breakfast, Now it being used to organise and share news, route around

censorship, provide customer support, share news items and a thousand of other applications that did not occur to the founders when they dreamed up the service.

http://www.whatisfailwhale.info/

“Old ideas can sometimes use new buildings. New ideas must use old buildings” Jane Jacobs

http://www.calera.com/

http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/wealth_of_networks/Main_Page

The wetland created by the beaver, like the trhiving platform created by the Twitter founders, invites variation because it is an open platform

where resources are shared as much as they are protected

Errors and myths in the book

● “Alexander Fleming famously discovered the medical virtues of penicilin when the mold accidentally infiltrated a culture of Staphylococcus he had lefft by an open window...” (134)

● “Gutenberg's printing press... the Chinese failed to adapt the technology for the mass production of texts, in large part because they imprinted the letterforms on the page by hand rubbing...” (153)

● “When Brin and Page decided to use links between Web pages as digital votes endorsing the content of those pages, they were exapting Berners-Lee's original design” (158)

● “The oral contraceptive... most of critical research that led to its development happened in the intellectual commons of university labs at Harvard” (234)