Looks like while I was gone Ezra Klein built a column around Steven Johnson’s very readable new book Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation, so he probably doesn’t need more progressive blogger press. Nevertheless, I read it on the trip back from Israel and it’s good.
The core argument is that the “lone genius thinks for a while and comes up with brilliant breakthrough” model of innovation is really quite rare. In practice, innovation is a collaborative process and the most innovative environments are networked environments.
I find the book persuasive, but it’s a difficult thesis to really prove if only because it’s hard to assemble a really rigorous definition of “innovation” or a clear standard for which innovations are the important ones. The book, for example, ends up tending to focus on a certain kind of technical innovation — air conditioning, the Internet, the printing press, the iPad — but this is hardly the only kind of innovation. Artistic and cultural innovation get mentioned. But probably the hardest kind of innovation to pin down is organizational innovation. As I understand it, Ikea didn’t really invent anything in the Thomas Edison sense. Certainly they didn’t invent the idea of sofas or particleboard. Nor did they come up with an original aesthetic — their brand of Scandinavian modernism is a straight ripoff. But the overall store concept is both quite innovative and quite distinctive. Similarly, Barnes & Noble didn’t invent the bookstore, the idea of a chain, the idea of a big box store, the idea of discounting, or the idea of selling coffee. But “let’s sell books in a chain of big box stores that heavily discount a select set of privileged new releases and also sell coffee” transformed the book industry until Amazon came along and transformed it again.
I think these kind of innovations actually provide tons of really strong examples for Johnson’s case so it’s too bad he didn’t discuss them. At the end of the day, technical innovations don’t do all that much to drive improvements in human welfare unless they’re matched with organizational innovations. How do we apply this new technology to do things better? Many of our pressing problems in health care and education ultimately amount to asking why there’s so little organizational innovation in these fields, creating a situation where technical innovation doesn’t increase productivity.
