Where Good Ideas Come From

"This book is not strictly about the city itself, although it does talk about the city as being extremely creative. Steve Johnson is a very interesting thinker who has written a number of accessible books on things like complexity theory and popular culture. He also wrote a wonderful book on the cholera epidemic in London in the 1830s. Where Good Ideas Come From is about creativity. He shows that cities are fantastically creative places, not just because they bring people together but because of the connections that people make once they come into cities. As a result, cities really are the places where good ideas are formed and developed. That’s certainly one level. Johnson also talks about a brilliant scientist called Geoffrey West, former head of the Santa Fe Institute [in New Mexico] which was a leading facility for the research of complexity theory. Geoffrey West was interested in metabolism – how quickly anything from an ant to a mouse to an elephant burn energy. He and his fellows at the institute studied whether a city has a metabolism. Johnson discovered, amazingly, that there is a particular, super-linear scale in which you can measure the metabolism of a city – in other words its creativity, its life, its energy. He combines this with Jane Jacobs to show that the life of a particular city street and this complexity theory are connected. What cities are good for, in terms of ideas, is that everyone has a half notion that needs to rub up against other things. You need to go around and find what’s lying about, and connect them with your new idea. For example, the creators of the first printing press looked at other technologies such as the winepress, and realised that that was exactly the way in which their new creation should work. Because the city is based on competition and diversification, and has a very competitive market, people are always looking for the edge or the golden opportunity. These opportunities come about not through a lone genius sitting in a room but through connections – through building up a network which gathers notions together until they form a good idea. It is quite Darwinian, and Johnson uses Darwin, in particular the coral reef, as a motive within the book. There is certainly a sense of evolution about it. One can simply see the capitalist market as a form of natural selection and mutation. Cities are also immensely efficient. If a city doubles in size, it actually increases its creativity and output by 115%, yet only needs 80% more energy."

"You can apply a lot of these things to great ideas in television. Mostly it is a slow hunch that develops over a long period of time and then finds a fertile resting ground, where it has a chance to grow and spread its wings and develop into something amazing. I would say more a great deal of sticking with something, and not giving up on something, even though it seems like an unproductive route to go down. Anybody around ideas has to recognise that there will be many, many blind alleys before you get to the right route. Yes, absolutely. Errors that you learn from, things where you think, ‘No that wasn’t right,’ and you develop a way of understanding what was right and what was wrong. There is something about really not thinking. In almost any industry, we’re always looking at demographics, at analysing the competition, understanding them and responding to them. But often, the best things come out of people just looking at themselves. Thinking, ‘What’s really interesting?’ ‘What interests me?’ Or looking at people around them. That’s where those persistent sparks can lead to something extraordinary."