I finished reading Steven B. Johnson's "Where Good Ideas Come From" recently. It's a good book, definitively recommended for everyone thinking about concepts and origins of innovations, although there are probably more scientific studies of the subjects. My favorite quotes:

«The question is how to push your brain toward those more creative networks. The answer, as it happens, is delightfully fractal: to make your mind more innovative, you have to place it inside environments that share that same network signature: networks of ideas or people that mimic the neural networks of a mind exploring the boundaries of the adjacent possible.»

«In thinking about networked innovation this way, I am specifically not talking about a "global brain", or a "hive mind". [...] Large collectives are rarely capable of true creativity or innovation. [...] When the first market towns emerged in Italy, they didn't magically create some higher-level group consciousness. They simply widened the pool of minds that could come up with and share good ideas. This is not the wisdom of the crowd, but the wisdom of someone in the crowd. It's not that the network itself is smart; it's that the individuals get smarter because they're conneted to the network.»

«The secret to organizational inspiration is to build information networks that allow hunches to persist and disperse and recombine. Instead of cloistering your hunches in brainstorm sessions or R&D labs, create an environment where brainstorming is something that is constantly running in the background, throughout the organization, a collective version of the 20-percent-time concept that proved so successful for Google and 3M.»

«[Martin] Ruef interviewed 766 graduates of the [Stanford Business] School who had gone on to have entrepreneurial careers. He created an elaborate system for scoring innovation based on a combination of factors: the introduction of new products, say, or the filing of trademarks and patents. And then he tracked each graduate's social network - not just the number of acquaintances but the kind of acquaintances they had. [...] What Ruef discovered was a ringing endorsement of the coffeehouse model of social networking: the most creative individuals in Ruef's survey consistently had broad social networks that extended outside their organization and involved peole from diverse fields of expertise. Diverse, horizontal social networks, in Ruef's analysis, were three times more innovative than uniform, vertical networks.»

«There are good ideas, and then there are good ideas that make it easier to have other good ideas.»