Where Good Ideas Come From Part 4

Entire inst.i.tutions and legal frameworks-not to mention a vast tower of conventional wisdom-have been built around the Carrier model of innovation. But what if he's the exception and not the rule?

There are three main approaches for settling a question as complicated as this. You can dive deeply into a single story and try to persuade your audience that it is representative of a larger societal truth. (This is the strategy I adopted in telling the stories of John Snow and Joseph Priestley-and the innovation environments that shaped their work-in my previous two books.) The advantage of this approach is that it allows you to examine a case study in exhaustive detail. The disadvantage, of course, is that your audience has to take it on faith that the case study you've chosen is indeed representative of a wider truth. The second approach, which I have taken in the preceding chapters of this book, is to build an argument around dozens of anecdotes, drawn from different contexts and historical periods. The anecdotal approach sacrifices detail for breadth. Yet it, too, runs the risk of being accused of cherry-picking. If there are a hundred Willis Carriers for every Tim Berners-Lee, it doesn't really prove anything to string together a book of Berners-Lee stories. (In fact, it may well be misleading to do so.) To see around the potential distortions of the case-study and anecdotal approaches, you need to see the entire field of innovation through a single lens. You can't tell whether Willis Carrier is an anomaly by studying the fine points of his biography. You need a wider view. So let us perform an experiment on the data available on the history of innovation. Take roughly two hundred of the most important innovations and scientific breakthroughs from the past six hundred years, starting with Gutenberg's press: everything from Einstein's theory of relativity to the invention of air conditioning to the birth of the World Wide Web. Plot each breakthrough somewhere in one of the four quadrants of this diagram:Cla.s.sify innovations that involved a small, coordinated team within an organization-or, even better, a single inventor-as "individual." Cla.s.sify as "networked" all the innovations that evolved through collective, distributed processes, with a large number of groups working on the same problem. Inventors who planned to capitalize directly from the sale or licensing of their invention should be cla.s.sified as "market"; those who wished their ideas to flow freely into the infosphere belong to the "non-market" side. The result is four quadrants: the first correlating to the private corporation or the solo entrepreneur; the second to a marketplace where multiple private firms interact; the third to the amateur scientist or hobbyist who shares his or her ideas freely; and, finally, the fourth quadrant, which corresponds to open-source or academic environments, where ideas can be built upon and reimagined in large, collaborative networks.

By taking this long view, we can begin to answer the question we began with: Just how dominant is the Willis Carrier model of innovation?7 Which quadrant has the most impressive track record for generating good ideas? Which quadrant has the most impressive track record for generating good ideas?

To give us some bearings, our anchor tenant in the first quadrant-the market-based individual-is Carrier himself, who single-handedly drove the invention of air conditioning and who had clear commercial aspirations for his device. (Gutenberg belongs there as well.) An example of a networked market innovation would be the vacuum tube, the creation of which involved a decentralized network with dozens of key partic.i.p.ants, including Lee de Forest, almost all of whom worked either as patent-p.r.o.ne entrepreneurs or research scientists within larger corporations. Tim Berners-Lee's creation of the World Wide Web belongs to the individual, non-market quadrant, while the Internet itself belongs to the fourth quadrant, given the vast number of public sector individuals and organizations involved in its creation.

It should be noted that these cla.s.sifications do not reflect the c.u.mulative nature of almost any innovation. Berners-Lee needed the open platform of the Internet for his hypertext creation to take flight, and thus the many individuals who built ARPANET and TCP/IP should be understood as essential contributors to the Web. Had those platforms been more proprietary ones-say, by charging licensing fees for the privilege of developing on top of them-it's entirely possible that Berners-Lee wouldn't have bothered creating the Web in the first place, given that it was a side project that his superiors knew next to nothing about.

It is in the nature of good ideas to stand on the shoulders of the giants who came before them, which means that by some measure, every important innovation is fundamentally a network affair. But, for the sake of clarity, let's not blur the line between "individual" and "network" by admitting to the discussion the prior innovations that inspired or supported the new generation of ideas. Yes, it is important that Gutenberg borrowed the screw-press technology from the winemakers, but one cannot say that the printing press was a collective innovation the way, for example, the Internet clearly was. So Gutenberg and Berners-Lee get cla.s.sified on the individual side of the spectrum.

There is no reliable mathematical formula for making these cla.s.sifications, and to a certain extent each of them involves an element of subjectivity. But I think that, seen together as a group, they reveal an interesting pattern-interesting enough, I would argue, for us to tolerate a little noise in the data. We are accustomed to looking at certain historical developments-mostly demographic-in this condensed, time-lapse format. We watch the growth of cities, or markets, or national populations unfold in charts where each tick measures a century. There are truths made visible by these time-lapse views that present-tense surveys or individual, narrative histories cannot properly s.h.i.+ne light on. (Malthus's Principles of Population Principles of Population, which so inspired Darwin and Wallace, offered an early glimpse of that special effect.) But we rarely measure cultural cultural changes this way. So much of the history of ideas is like Darwin's work as a naturalist during the long years that preceded the publication of changes this way. So much of the history of ideas is like Darwin's work as a naturalist during the long years that preceded the publication of Origin Origin: a.n.a.lyzing an individual species, defining its key characteristics, and putting it in the proper box. That's a fine approach for understanding why a specific idea came into being at a particular moment in time. But if you want to wrestle with the question one link farther up the chain-how do good ideas tend tend to come about-you need to take on the problem from a different angle. There's a place for counting barnacles. But sometimes you need to zoom out and take the longer view. to come about-you need to take on the problem from a different angle. There's a place for counting barnacles. But sometimes you need to zoom out and take the longer view.

In taking this approach, I am exapting a technique that the literary historian Franco Moretti calls "distant reading." In a series of influential books and essays published over the past decade, Moretti has broken from the traditional English Department approach of "close reading," in which individual literary texts are a.n.a.lyzed in exhaustive detail. It doesn't really matter whether the close reading in question is an old-school tribute to an artist's singular talents or a politicized deconstruction-you can read the text closely to reveal the genius of the author, or his latent h.o.m.ophobia, but in each case you're doing close reading, where every sentence is a potential datapoint in your a.n.a.lysis. ("At bottom," Moretti writes, "it's a theological exercise-very solemn treatment of very few texts taken very seriously.") Distant reading takes the satellite view of the literary landscape, looking for larger patterns in the history of the stories we tell each other. In one typically inventive a.n.a.lysis, Moretti tracked the evolution of subgenres in popular British novels from 1740 to 1915, an immense taxonomy of narrative forms-spy novels, picaresques, gothic novels, nautical tales, mysteries, and dozens of other distinct forms. He plotted the life span of each sub-genre as a dominant species in the British literary ecosystem. The result is on page 223.

British Novelistic Genres, 1740-1900

What happens when you take the distant approaching to reading novels is that you're able to see patterns that simply aren't visible on the scale of paragraphs and pages, or even entire books. You could read a dozen "silver fork" novels and bildungsromans and yet miss the most striking fact revealed by Moretti's chart: that the diversity of forms is strikingly balanced by their uncannily similar life spans, which Moretti attributes to underlying generational turnover. Every twenty-five to thirty years a new batch of genres becomes dominant, as a new generation of readers seeks out new literary conventions. If you're trying to understand the meaning of an individual work, you have to read closely. But if you're interested in the overall behavior of the literary system-its own patterns of innovation-sometimes you have to read from a long way off.

In the study of scientific or technological innovation, the equivalent of close reading is the meticulous biography of the great inventor, or the history of a single technology: the radio, say, or the personal computer. As valuable as those approaches can be, they have their limitations. Close reading leaves you with the idiosyncrasies of each individual or invention, the local color-but not the general laws. When you view the history of innovation from a distance, what you lose in detail you gain in perspective. Cla.s.sifying two hundred good ideas into four broad quadrants certainly makes it harder to learn anything specific about each individual innovation. But it does allow us to answer the question we began with: What kind of environments make innovation possible in the first place?

1400-1600.

Because innovation is subject to historical changes-many of which are themselves the result of influential innovations in the transmission of information-the four quadrants display distinct shapes at different historical periods. Start with this view of the breakthrough ideas from 1400 to 1600, beginning with Gutenberg's press and continuing on to the dawn of the Enlightenment (see page 227).

This is the shape that Renaissance innovation takes, seen from a great (conceptual) distance. Most innovation cl.u.s.ters in the third quadrant: non-market individuals. A handful of outliers are scattered fairly evenly across the other three quadrants. This is the pattern that forms when information networks are slow and unreliable, and entrepreneurial economic conventions are poorly developed. It's too hard to share ideas when the printing press and the postal system are still novelties, and there's not enough incentive to commercialize those ideas without a robust marketplace of buyers and investors. And so the era is dominated by solo artists: amateur investigators, usually well-to-do, working on their own private obsessions. Not surprisingly, this period marks the birth of the modern notion of the inventive genius, the rogue visionary who somehow sees beyond the horizon that limits his contemporaries-da Vinci, Copernicus, Galileo. Some of those solo artists (Galileo most famously) worked outside of broader groups because their research posed a significant security threat to the established powers of the day. The few innovations that did emerge out of networks-the portable, spring-loaded watches that first appeared in Nuremberg in 1480, the double-entry bookkeeping system developed by Italian merchants-have their geographic origins in cities, where information networks were more robust. First-quadrant solo entrepreneurs, crafting their products in secret to ensure their eventual payday, turn out to be practically nonexistent. Gutenberg was the exception, not the rule.

1600-1800.

Scanning the next two centuries, we see that the pattern changes dramatically (see page 229).

Solo, amateur innovation (quadrant three) surrenders much of its lead to the rising power of networks and commerce (quadrant four). The most dramatic change lies along the horizontal axis, in a ma.s.s migration from individual breakthroughs (on the left) to the creative insights of the group (on the right). Less than 10 percent of innovation during the Renaissance is networked; two centuries later, a majority of breakthrough ideas emerge in collaborative environments. Multiple developments precipitate this s.h.i.+ft, starting with Gutenberg's press, which begins to have a material impact on secular research a century and a half after the first Bible hits the stands, as scientific ideas are stored and shared in the form of books and pamphlets. Postal systems, so central to Enlightenment science, flower across Europe; population densities increase in the urban centers; coffeehouses and formal inst.i.tutions like the Royal Society create new hubs for intellectual collaboration.

Many of those innovation hubs exist outside the marketplace. The great minds of the period-Newton, Franklin, Priestley, Hooke, Jefferson, Locke, Lavoisier, Linnaeas-had little hope of financial reward for their ideas, and did everything in their power to encourage their circulation. A vertical movement toward market incentives is noticeable, nonetheless. As industrial capitalism arises in England in the eighteenth century, new economic structures raise the stakes for commercial ventures: tantalizing rewards lure innovators into private enterprise, and the codification of English patent laws in the early 1700s gives some rea.s.surance that good ideas will not be stolen with impunity. Despite this new protection, most commercial innovation during this period takes a collaborative form, with many individuals and firms contributing crucial tweaks and refinements to the product. The history books like to condense these slower, evolutionary processes into eureka moments dominated by a single inventor, but most of the key technologies that powered the Industrial Revolution were instances of what scholars call "collective invention." Textbooks casually refer to James Watt as the inventor of the steam engine, but in truth Watt was one of dozens of innovators who refined the device over the course of the eighteenth century.

1800-present

Let us pause for a moment on the cusp of the modern age and take a few bets as to what pattern will form in the final two centuries of the millennium. I think most of us would expect to see a dramatic consolidation of innovative activity in the first quadrant, as capitalism enters its mature period, spanning the ages of ma.s.s production and the consumer society. All the elements would seem to predict an explosion of first-quadrant activity: an increasingly wealthy public willing to spend money on new gadgets; strong enforcement of intellectual property rights; the emergence of corporate research-and-development labs; and a growing pool of private capital willing to finance speculative ventures. If the compet.i.tive marketplace of modern capitalism is the great innovation engine of our time, the first quadrant should by rights dominate the last two centuries of activity.

But instead, another pattern appears (see page 229).

Against all odds, the first quadrant turns out to be the least populated on the grid. Willis Carrier is an outlier after all. In the private sector, the proprietary breakthrough achieved in a closed lab turns out to be a rarity. For every Alfred n.o.bel, inventing dynamite in secret in the suburbs of Stockholm, there are a half dozen collective inventions like the vacuum tube or the television, whose existence depended upon multiple firms driven by the profit motive who managed to create a significant new product via decentralized networking. Folklore calls Edison the inventor of the lightbulb, but in truth the lightbulb came into being through a complex network of interaction between Edison and his rivals, each contributing key pieces to the puzzle along the way. Collective invention is not some socialist fantasy; entrepreneurs like Edison and de Forest were very much motivated by the possibility of financial rewards, and they tried to patent as much as they could. But the utility of building on other people's ideas often outweighed the exclusivity of building something entirely from scratch. You could develop small ideas in a locked room, cut off from the hunches and insights of your compet.i.tion. But if you wanted to make a major new incursion into the adjacent possible, you needed company.

Even more striking, though, is the explosion of fourth-quadrant activity.

Why have so many good ideas flourished in the fourth quadrant, despite the lack of economic incentives? One answer is that economic incentives have a much more complicated relations.h.i.+p to the development and adoption of good ideas than we usually imagine. The promise of an immense payday encourages people to come up with useful innovations, but at the same time it forces people to protect protect those innovations. Economists define "efficient markets" as markets where information is evenly distributed among all the buyers and sellers in the s.p.a.ce. Efficiency is generally held to be a universal goal for any economy-unless the economy happens to traffic in ideas. If ideas were fully liberated, then entrepreneurs wouldn't be able to profit from their innovations, because their compet.i.tors would immediately adopt them. And so where innovation is concerned, we have deliberately built those innovations. Economists define "efficient markets" as markets where information is evenly distributed among all the buyers and sellers in the s.p.a.ce. Efficiency is generally held to be a universal goal for any economy-unless the economy happens to traffic in ideas. If ideas were fully liberated, then entrepreneurs wouldn't be able to profit from their innovations, because their compet.i.tors would immediately adopt them. And so where innovation is concerned, we have deliberately built inefficient inefficient markets: environments that protect copyrights and patents and trade secrets and a thousand other barricades we've erected to keep promising ideas out of the minds of others. markets: environments that protect copyrights and patents and trade secrets and a thousand other barricades we've erected to keep promising ideas out of the minds of others.

That deliberate inefficiency doesn't exist in the fourth quadrant. No, these non-market, decentralized environments do not have immense paydays to motivate their partic.i.p.ants. But their openness creates other, powerful opportunities for good ideas to flourish. All of the patterns of innovation we have observed in the previous chapters-liquid networks, slow hunches, serendipity, noise, exaptation, emergent platforms-do best in open environments where ideas flow in unregulated channels. In more controlled environments, where the natural movement of ideas is tightly restrained, they suffocate. A slow hunch can't readily find its way to another hunch that might complete it if there's a tariff to be paid every time it tries to make a new serendipitous connection; exaptations can't readily occur across disciplinary lines if there are sentries guarding those borders. In open environments, however, those patterns of innovation can easily take hold and multiply.

Like any complex social reality, creating innovation environments is a matter of trade-offs. All other things being equal, financial incentives will indeed spur innovation. The problem is, all other things are never never equal. When you introduce financial rewards into a system, barricades and secrecy emerge, making it harder for the open patterns of innovation to work their magic. So the question is: What is the right balance? It's certainly conceivable that the promise of hitting a financial jackpot is so overwhelming that it more than makes up for the inefficiencies introduced by intellectual property law and closed R&D labs. That has generally been the guiding a.s.sumption for most modern discussions of innovation's roots, an a.s.sumption largely based on the free market's track record for innovation during that period. Because capitalist economies proved to be more innovative than socialist and communist economies, the story went, the deliberate inefficiencies of the market-based approach must have benefits that exceed their costs. equal. When you introduce financial rewards into a system, barricades and secrecy emerge, making it harder for the open patterns of innovation to work their magic. So the question is: What is the right balance? It's certainly conceivable that the promise of hitting a financial jackpot is so overwhelming that it more than makes up for the inefficiencies introduced by intellectual property law and closed R&D labs. That has generally been the guiding a.s.sumption for most modern discussions of innovation's roots, an a.s.sumption largely based on the free market's track record for innovation during that period. Because capitalist economies proved to be more innovative than socialist and communist economies, the story went, the deliberate inefficiencies of the market-based approach must have benefits that exceed their costs.

But, as we have seen, this is a false comparison. The test is not how the market fares against command economies. The real test is how it fares against the fourth quadrant. As the private corporation evolved over the past two centuries, a mirror image of it grew in parallel in the public sector: the modern research university. Most academic research today is fourth-quadrant in its approach: new ideas are published with the deliberate goal of allowing other partic.i.p.ants to refine and build upon them, with no restrictions on their circulation beyond proper acknowledgment of their origin. It is not pure anarchy, to be sure. You can't simply steal a colleague's idea without proper citation, but there is a fundamental difference between suing for patent infringement and asking for a footnote. Academics are paid salaries, of course, and successful ideas can lead to much-sought-after tenured professors.h.i.+ps, but the economic rewards are minuscule compared to those of the private sector. And, crucially, those rewards are not dependent on introducing an artificial inefficiency into the information network. A historian who develops a brilliant new theory about the origins of the Industrial Revolution may well land a chaired professors.h.i.+p at an Ivy League school thanks to her theory, but the theory itself can freely circulate through the environment, where it can be challenged, enlarged, exapted, and recycled in countless ways. The university system may be big business these days, and patents do play a role in some specialized fields, but for the most part the university remains an information commons.

Universities have a reputation for ivory-tower isolation from the real world, but it is an undeniable fact that most of the paradigmatic ideas in science and technology that arose during the past century have roots in academic research. This is obviously true for the "pure" sciences like theoretical physics, but it is also true for lines of research that on their surface seem to have more straightforwardly commercial applications. The oral contraceptive, for instance, has generated billions of dollars for Big Pharma over the past half century, but most of the critical research that led to its development happened in the intellectual commons of university labs at Harvard, Princeton, and Stanford. In the language of the last chapter, open networks of academic researchers often create emergent platforms where commercial development becomes possible. The next decade will likely see a wave of pharmaceutical products enabled by genomic science, but that underlying scientific platform-most critically, the ability to sequence and map DNA-was almost entirely developed by a decentralized group of academic scientists working outside the private sector in the 1960s and seventies. This is a pattern we see again and again in the modern era: fourth-quadrant innovation creates a new open platform that commercial ent.i.ties can then build upon, either by repackaging and refining the original breakthrough, or by developing emergent innovations on top of the underlying platform.

Fourth-quadrant innovation has been a.s.sisted by another crucial development: the increased flow of information. Information spillover required the geographic density of cities in the Renaissance, while the postal system made small distributed webs of creativity possible in the Enlightenment. But the Internet has effectively reduced the transmission costs of sharing good ideas to zero. In Galileo's time, all the benefits of information spillover were as potent as they are today. But it was far more difficult to create the kind of liquid network where those serendipitous collisions and exaptations could take place. The connectedness of modern life means that we face the opposite problem: it is much harder to stop stop information from spilling over than it is to get it into circulation. The consequence of this is that private-sector firms who are intent on protecting their intellectual a.s.sets have to invest time and money in building barricades of artificial scarcity. Partic.i.p.ants in the fourth quadrant don't have those costs: they can concentrate on coming up with new ideas, not building fortresses around the old ones. And because those ideas can freely circulate through the infosphere, they can be refined and expanded by other minds in the network. information from spilling over than it is to get it into circulation. The consequence of this is that private-sector firms who are intent on protecting their intellectual a.s.sets have to invest time and money in building barricades of artificial scarcity. Partic.i.p.ants in the fourth quadrant don't have those costs: they can concentrate on coming up with new ideas, not building fortresses around the old ones. And because those ideas can freely circulate through the infosphere, they can be refined and expanded by other minds in the network.

We do not have a ready-made political vocabulary for the fourth quadrant, particularly the noninst.i.tutional forms of collaboration that have developed around the open-source community. Because these open systems operate outside the conventional incentives of capitalism and resist the usual strictures of intellectual property, the mind reflexively wants to put them on the side of socialism. And yet they are as far from the state-centralized economies that Marx and Engels helped invent as they are from greed-is-good capitalism. They themselves are not the product of market incentives, but they often create environments where private firms thrive, a phenomenon Lawrence Lessig alludes to in his concept of the "hybrid economy," which blends elements from the open networks of the intellectual commons with the more proprietary walls and tariffs of the private sphere.

None of this is meant to imply that the marketplace is the enemy of innovation, or that compet.i.tion between rival firms doesn't often lead to useful new products. (The second quadrant, after all, bustles with dozens of brilliant ideas that changed our lives for the better.) And top-heavy bureaucracies remain innovation sinkholes. But, fortunately for us, the choice is not between decentralized markets and command-and-control states. Much of the history of intellectual achievement over these past centuries has lived in a less formal s.p.a.ce between those two regimes: in the grad seminar and the coffeehouse and the hobbyist's home lab and the digital bulletin board. The fourth quadrant should be a reminder that more than one formula exists for innovation. The wonders of modern life did not emerge exclusively from the proprietary clash between private firms. They also emerged from open networks.

A few months after Darwin published On the Origin of Species On the Origin of Species in 1859, Karl Marx wrote Friedrich Engels a letter that included a few lines endorsing Darwin's biological radicalism. "Although it is developed in the crude English style, this is the book which contains the basis in natural history for our view." The "crude English style" was evidently Darwin's strange unwillingness to incessantly relate his scientific views back to Hegelian dialectics. (Many now regard that as one of Darwin's strengths as a writer.) Beyond the sneers, Marx and Engels were clearly energized by the controversy Darwin had unleashed and saw him as a kindred spirit in an age that seemed on the verge of multiple revolutions-in science as well as in society. It is unclear whether Darwin felt quite the same way about his Prussian admirers. Marx offered to dedicate volume two of in 1859, Karl Marx wrote Friedrich Engels a letter that included a few lines endorsing Darwin's biological radicalism. "Although it is developed in the crude English style, this is the book which contains the basis in natural history for our view." The "crude English style" was evidently Darwin's strange unwillingness to incessantly relate his scientific views back to Hegelian dialectics. (Many now regard that as one of Darwin's strengths as a writer.) Beyond the sneers, Marx and Engels were clearly energized by the controversy Darwin had unleashed and saw him as a kindred spirit in an age that seemed on the verge of multiple revolutions-in science as well as in society. It is unclear whether Darwin felt quite the same way about his Prussian admirers. Marx offered to dedicate volume two of Das Kapital Das Kapital to Darwin, who demurred: "I should prefer the part or volume not to be dedicated to me (although I thank you for the intended honour), as that would, in a certain extent, suggest my approval of the whole work, with which I am not acquainted." to Darwin, who demurred: "I should prefer the part or volume not to be dedicated to me (although I thank you for the intended honour), as that would, in a certain extent, suggest my approval of the whole work, with which I am not acquainted."

From a scientific point of view, Marx and Engels were smart to side with Darwin so early in the debate over his "dangerous" idea. But they couldn't have been more wrong in their predictions about the way the theory would play out in the politico-economic arena. They antic.i.p.ated, correctly, that a.n.a.logies would be drawn between Darwin's "survival of the fittest" and the compet.i.tive selection of capitalist free-market economies. Marx and Engels just a.s.sumed those a.n.a.logies would be launched as critiques critiques of capitalism. In 1865, Engels wrote to a friend, "Nothing discredits modern bourgeois development so much as the fact that it has not yet succeeded in getting beyond the economic forms of the animal world." of capitalism. In 1865, Engels wrote to a friend, "Nothing discredits modern bourgeois development so much as the fact that it has not yet succeeded in getting beyond the economic forms of the animal world."

As it turned out, the exact opposite happened. Darwin's theories were invoked countless times in the twentieth century as a defense of the free-market system. Aligning them with the animal world didn't discredit markets, as Engels had predicted. It made markets look natural. natural. If Mother Nature made such a splendidly diverse planet through an algorithm of ruthless compet.i.tion between selfish agents, why shouldn't our economic systems follow the same rules? If Mother Nature made such a splendidly diverse planet through an algorithm of ruthless compet.i.tion between selfish agents, why shouldn't our economic systems follow the same rules?

Yet the true story of nature is not one of exclusively ruthless compet.i.tion between selfish agents, as Darwin himself realized. Origin of Species Origin of Species ends with one of the most famous pa.s.sages in the history of science, one that echoes the journal entry he wrote on leaving the Keeling Islands more than twenty years before: ends with one of the most famous pa.s.sages in the history of science, one that echoes the journal entry he wrote on leaving the Keeling Islands more than twenty years before: It is interesting to contemplate a tangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent upon each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us . . . Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life . . .

Darwin's words here oscillate between two structuring metaphors that govern all his work: the complex interdependencies of the tangled bank, and the war of nature; the symbiotic connections of an ecosystem and the survival of the fittest. The popular caricature of Darwin's theory emphasizes compet.i.tive struggle above everything else. Yet so many of the insights his theory made possible have revealed the collaborative and connective forces at work in the natural world.

We have been living with a comparable caricature in our a.s.sumptions about cultural innovation. Look at the past five centuries from the long view, and one fact confronts the eye immediately: market-based compet.i.tion has no monopoly on innovation. Compet.i.tion and the profit motive do indeed motivate us to turn good ideas into s.h.i.+pping products, but more often than not, the ideas themselves come from somewhere else. Whatever its politics, the fourth quadrant has been an extraordinary s.p.a.ce of human creativity and insight. Even without the economic rewards of artificial scarcity, fourth-quadrant environments have played an immensely important role in the nurturing and circulation of good ideas-now more than ever. In Darwin's language, the open connections of the tangled bank have been just as generative as the war of nature. Stephen Jay Gould makes this point powerfully in the allegory of his sandal collection: "The wedge of compet.i.tion has been, ever since Darwin, the canonical argument for progress in normal times," he writes. "But I will claim that the wheel of quirky and unpredictable functional s.h.i.+ft (the tires-to-sandals principle) is the major source of what we call progress at all scales." The Nairobi entrepreneur selling sandals in an open-air market may indeed be in compet.i.tion with other cobblers, but what makes his trade possible is the junkyard full of tires waiting to be freely converted into footwear, and the fact that the good idea of converting tires into sandals can be pa.s.sed from cobbler to cobbler by simple observation, with no licensing agreements to restrict the flow.

In 1813, a Boston mill owner, Isaac McPherson, found himself immersed in a long and frustrating patent dispute with a Philadelphia-based inventor named Oliver Evans, who had patented an automated grist mill several years before. Evans's engineering talent was matched only by his litigiousness. He was notorious for aggressively enforcing his patents, and was among the first to exploit the new restrictive powers of the federal patent system after its creation in 1790. The originality of Evans's patented invention was highly debatable; the grist-mill system relied on bucket elevators, conveyor belts, and Archimedean screws-all of which were clearly innovations that had long been in the public domain. When Evans sued McPherson for violating his patents, the Boston industrialist decided to reach out to the first patent commissioner of the United States, a former politician and inventor himself, now living in rural Virginia. And so, in the summer of 1813, McPherson wrote a letter to Thomas Jefferson, asking for his interpretation of Oliver Evans's claim.

Jefferson wrote back on August 13. Reading his letter now, one cannot help but be amazed by the range of Jefferson's intelligence. His focus narrows into intense technical detail on the specifics of Evans's invention, and then widens to their ancient prehistory. ("The screw of Archimedes is as ancient, at least, as the age of that mathematician, who died more than 2,000 years ago. Diodorus Siculus speaks of it, L. i., p. 21, and L. v., p. 217, of Stevens' edition of 1559, folio; and Vitruvius, xii.") He reviews the relevant law with the sharp eye of a legal scholar, opining on the sections that he thinks are fundamentally flawed. But the most stirring pa.s.sages arise when Jefferson waxes philosophical on the nature of ideas themselves: Stable owners.h.i.+p is the gift of social law, and is given late in the progress of society. It would be curious then, if an idea, the fugitive fermentation of an individual brain, could, of natural right, be claimed in exclusive and stable property. If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all s.p.a.ce, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property.

Ideas, Jefferson argues, have an almost gravitational attraction toward the fourth quadrant. The natural state of ideas is flow and spillover and connection. It is society that keeps them in chains.

Does this mean we have to do away with intellectual property law? Of course not. The innovation track record of the fourth quadrant doesn't mean that patents should be abolished and all forms of information allowed to run free. But it should definitely put the lie to the reigning orthodoxy that without the artificial scarcity of intellectual property, innovation would grind to a halt. There are plenty of understandable reasons why the law should make it easier for innovative people or organizations to profit from their creations. We may very well decide as a society that people simply deserve deserve to profit from their good ideas, and so we have to introduce a little artificial scarcity to ensure those rewards. As someone who creates intellectual property for a living, I am more than sympathetic toward that argument. But it is another matter altogether to argue that those restrictions will themselves promote innovation in the long run. to profit from their good ideas, and so we have to introduce a little artificial scarcity to ensure those rewards. As someone who creates intellectual property for a living, I am more than sympathetic toward that argument. But it is another matter altogether to argue that those restrictions will themselves promote innovation in the long run.

As Lawrence Lessig has so persuasively argued over the years, there is nothing "natural" about the artificial scarcity of intellectual property law. Those laws are deliberate interventions crafted by human intelligence and are enforced almost entirely by non-market powers. Jefferson's point, in his letter to McPherson, is that if you really want to get into a debate about which system is more "natural," then the free flow of ideas is always going to trump the artificial scarcity of patents. Ideas are intrinsically copyable in the way that food and fuel are not. You have to build dams to keep ideas from flowing.

To my mind, the great question for our time is whether large organizations-public and and private, governments private, governments and and corporations alike-can better harness the innovation turbine of fourth-quadrant systems. On the private-sector side, the success of companies like Google and Twitter and Amazon-all of whom have, in different ways, contributed to and benefited from fourth-quadrant innovation-has made it clear that, in the software world, at least, a little openness goes a long way. I suspect those lessons will grow increasingly inescapable in the decades to come. But it is the public sector that I find more interesting, because governments and other non-market inst.i.tutions have long suffered from the innovation malaise of top-heavy bureaucracies. Today, these inst.i.tutions have an opportunity to fundamentally alter the way they cultivate and promote good ideas. The more the government thinks of itself as an open platform instead of a centralized bureaucracy, the better it will be for all of us, citizens and activists and entrepreneurs alike. corporations alike-can better harness the innovation turbine of fourth-quadrant systems. On the private-sector side, the success of companies like Google and Twitter and Amazon-all of whom have, in different ways, contributed to and benefited from fourth-quadrant innovation-has made it clear that, in the software world, at least, a little openness goes a long way. I suspect those lessons will grow increasingly inescapable in the decades to come. But it is the public sector that I find more interesting, because governments and other non-market inst.i.tutions have long suffered from the innovation malaise of top-heavy bureaucracies. Today, these inst.i.tutions have an opportunity to fundamentally alter the way they cultivate and promote good ideas. The more the government thinks of itself as an open platform instead of a centralized bureaucracy, the better it will be for all of us, citizens and activists and entrepreneurs alike.

The wonderful irony is that this historic opportunity comes to governments in part because of an innovation that they unleashed on the world: the Internet, probably the clearest example of the way that public- and private-sector innovation can complement each other. The generative platform of the Internet (and the Web) has created a s.p.a.ce where countless fortunes have been made over the past thirty years, but the platform itself was created by the loose affiliation of information scientists around the world, funded, in large part, by the federal government of the United States. There are good ideas, and then there are good ideas that make it easier to have other good ideas. YouTube was a good idea that was made possible by the even better ideas of the Internet and the Web. The fact that those idea-generating platforms were developed outside the private sector is no accident. Proprietary platforms that reach critical ma.s.s are not unheard of-Microsoft Windows has had a good run, for instance, and Apple's iPhone platform has been extraordinarily innovative in its first three years-but they are rarities. Generative platforms require all the patterns of innovation we have seen over the preceding pages; they need to create a s.p.a.ce where hunches and serendipitous collisions and exaptations and recycling can thrive. It is possible to create such a s.p.a.ce in a walled garden. But you are far better off situating your platform in a commons.

But perhaps "commons" is the wrong word for the environment we're trying to imagine, though it has a long and sanctified history in intellectual property law. The problem with the term is twofold. For starters, it has conventionally been used in opposition to the compet.i.tive struggle of the marketplace. The original "commons" of rural England disappeared when they were swallowed up by the private enclosures of agrarian capitalism in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Yet the innovation environments we have explored are not necessarily hostile to compet.i.tion and profit. More important, however, the commons metaphor doesn't suggest the patterns of recycling and exaptation and recombination that define so many innovation s.p.a.ces. When you think of a commons, you think of a cleared field dominated by a single resource for grazing. You don't think of an ecosystem. The commons is a monocrop gra.s.sland, not a tangled bank.

I prefer another metaphor drawn from nature: the reef. You need only survey a coral reef (or a rain forest) for a few minutes to see that compet.i.tion for resources abounds in this s.p.a.ce, as Darwin rightly observed. But that is not the source of its marvelous biodiversity. The struggle for existence is universal in nature. The few residents of a desert ecosystem are every bit as compet.i.tive as their equivalents on a coral reef. What makes the reef so inventive is not the struggle between the organisms but the way they have learned to collaborate-the coral and the zooxanth.e.l.lae and the parrotfish borrowing and reinventing each other's work. This is the ultimate explanation of Darwin's Paradox: the reef has unlocked so many doors of the adjacent possible because of the way it shares.

The reef helps us understand the other riddles we began with: the runaway innovation of cities, and of the Web. They, too, are environments that compulsively connect and remix that most valuable of resources: information. Like the Web, the city is a platform that often makes private commerce possible but which is itself outside the marketplace. You do business in the big city, but the city itself belongs to everyone. ("City air is free air," as the old saying goes.) Ideas collide, emerge, recombine; new enterprises find homes in the sh.e.l.ls abandoned by earlier hosts; informal hubs allow different disciplines to borrow from one another. These are the s.p.a.ces that have long supported innovation, from those first Mesopotamian settlements eight thousand years ago to the invisible layers of software that support today's Web.

Ideas rise in crowds, as Poincare said. They rise in liquid networks where connection is valued more than protection. So if we want to build environments that generate good ideas-whether those environments are in schools or corporations or governments or our own personal lives-we need to keep that history in mind, and not fall back on the easy a.s.sumptions that compet.i.tive markets are the only reliable source of good ideas. Yes, the market has been a great engine of innovation. But so has the reef.

Most of us, I realize, don't have a direct say in what macro forms of information and economic organization prevail in the wider society, though we do influence that outcome indirectly, in the basic act of choosing between employment in the private or the public sector. But this is the beauty of the long-zoom perspective: the patterns recur at other scales. You may not be able to turn your government into a coral reef, but you can create comparable environments on the scale of everyday life: in the workplaces you inhabit; in the way you consume media; in the way you augment your memory. The patterns are simple, but followed together, they make for a whole that is wiser than the sum of its parts. Go for a walk; cultivate hunches; write everything down, but keep your folders messy; embrace serendipity; make generative mistakes; take on multiple hobbies; frequent coffeehouses and other liquid networks; follow the links; let others build on your ideas; borrow, recycle, reinvent. Build a tangled bank.Acknowledgments.

Given that this is a book in part about the generative power of slow hunches, it should come as no surprise that the topic has been lingering in my mind for almost a decade now, ever since I designed an elaborate experiment, for my book Mind Wide Open Mind Wide Open, to scan my brain as it was trying to come up with a good idea in an FMRI machine. For the past four years, after I began work on the project in earnest, I have consciously thought of this book as the closing volume in an unofficial trilogy that began with The Ghost Map The Ghost Map and and The Invention of Air The Invention of Air, both books about world-changing ideas and the environments that made them possible. (In a sense, you can think of this book as the latent theory lurking behind those more focused narrative case-studies.) So I am grateful to the many provocative and serendipitous responses I received from readers, critics, and listeners regarding those two earlier books, many of which opened doors to new rooms that I have greatly enjoyed exploring.

I want to extend particular thanks to several organizations that supported me during the writing of the book, starting with my colleagues at outside.in, led by Mark Josephson, who have tolerated the eccentric schedule of an author/executive chairman with graciousness and true friends.h.i.+p. Thanks to Columbia University's Journalism School for appointing me the Hearst New Media Scholar in Residence and for providing a forum where I could talk about commonplace books, my grad school days, and the iPad in a single lecture. Thanks to the wonderful SXSW festival for inviting me to talk about the ecosystem of news in the spring of 2009, as the ideas for this book were starting to come together. My editors at Time Time, Wired Wired, The Wall Street Journal The Wall Street Journal, and The New York Times The New York Times-particularly Rick Stengel, Alex Star, James Ryerson, Tim O'Brien, Chris Anderson, and Larry Rout-allowed me to work through some of these ideas (and sentences) in public, and provided insightful comments along the way. (My former editors at Discover Discover, Stephen Petranek and David Grogan, helped me cultivate some of these themes several years ago during my tenure as a columnist there.) As usual, the team at Riverhead has been a great help to me, both in believing in this idea in its embryonic state, and in allowing me to follow my serendipitous discoveries of both outside.in and Joseph Priestley. Sean McDonald and Geoff Kloske were incredibly patient when my hunch turned out to be even slower than originally forecast, and when the book finally began to come together, they did amazing work turning it into a finished product. I'm also grateful to Matthew Venzon, Emily Bell, Hal Fessenden, Helen Conford, and my lecture agents at the Leigh Bureau for their support. My research a.s.sistant, Chris Ross, was enormously helpful in collaborating on our maps of innovation history. Once again my agent, Lydia Wills, displayed her extraordinary knack for encouraging my good ideas, and delicately shooting down the idiotic ones.

I am particularly grateful to the people who read parts or all of the ma.n.u.script in draft form: Brent Constantz, Charlane Nemeth, Brian Eno, John Wilbanks, and in particular Ray Ozzie, Carl Zimmer, and Scott Berkun, and my favorite line editor, Alexa Robinson. They offered many improvements to the ideas contained in this book. What errors remain are entirely my responsibility. It's up to you to decide whether they prove to be generative ones.

Brooklyn, NY May 2010

Appendix: Chronology of Key Innovations, 1400-2000 DOUBLE-ENTRY ACCOUNTING (1300-1400) First codified by the Franciscan friar and mathematician Luca Pacioli in 1494, the double-entry method had been used for at least two centuries by Italian bankers and merchants. Some evidence suggests that the technique was developed by Islamic entrepreneurs who pa.s.sed it on to the Italians through the trade hubs of Venice and Genoa.

PRINTING PRESS (1440).

While elements of the printing press, including the concept of movable type, date back to earlier Chinese and Korean inventors, the first true printing press that combined the screw press and metallic movable type was created by Johannes Gutenberg circa 1440.

CONCAVE LENS (1451).

Humans have used lenses to magnify images and to start fires for thousands of years, but the first use of a concave lens to treat myopia is attributed to the polymath German cardinal Nicholas of Cusa.

PARACHUTE (1483).

Leonardo da Vinci sketched the original design for a parachute in 1438 in the margin of a notebook. The first physical test of the design occurred in 1783, when Louis-Sebastien Lenormand leapt from the Montpelier Observatory in France and, with the aid of his primitive parachute, landed without injury. In 2000, an exact replica of da Vinci's parachute was constructed and tested, and proved to function.

TERRESTRIAL GLOBE (1492).

The Nuremberg-based mapmaker Martin Behaim constructed the first terrestrial globe in the early 1490s, after returning from extensive journeys in West Africa. He called it the Erdapfel, which translates to "earth apple."

BALL BEARINGS (1497).

Conceived and sketched by Leonardo da Vinci in 1497 as a method to reduce friction; the first patent for ball bearings was awarded to Philip Vaughan in 1794.

PORTABLE WATCHES (1500).

One of the canonical examples of collective invention, portable watches evolved out a group of clockmakers in Nuremberg in the early 1500s, led by one Peter Henlein, who created the first lightweight watch. Heinlen's watch was portable, but not terribly accurate; subsequent improvements by his Nuremberg peers allowed the device to keep better time.

EARTH ROTATES AROUND SUN (1514).

Nicolaus Copernicus first wrote out his "heliocentric" theory of the solar system as a small pamphlet around 1514, but did not formally publish the idea for more than twenty years, for fear of the controversy it would unleash. Word of his radical theory leaked out and began spreading through the enlightened minds of Europe during that period, but the first official publication came in his posthumous text, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, published in 1543. published in 1543.

SQUARE ROOT AND PLUS AND MINUS SYMBOLS (1525).

German mathematician Christoph Rudolff invented the modern mathematical symbols "+" and "" and "" in Coss Coss, the first comprehensive guide to algebra in German in 1525.

CUBIC EQUATIONS AND COMPLEX NUMBERS (1530-1540).

The mathematicians of the Islamic Renaissance published several important papers on the understanding of cubic equations-along with the notion of complex numbers-which are essential to determining the area and volume of objects. But the modern technique for solving them is most prominently a.s.sociated with the Italian mathematician and engineer Niccol Tartaglia, who won a famous contest in 1530 that showcased his approach. Two other Italians from that period, Scipione del Ferro and his student Antonio Fiore, contributed to the math as well.

PULMONARY RESPIRATION (1535).

The Spanish religious radical Michael Servetus made the first convincing case that the aeration of blood took place in the lungs, after studying the size of the pulmonary artery as a medical student at the University of Paris.

ETHER (1540).

German botanist Valerius Cordus discovered and described a radically new method for the synthesis of ether in 1540, calling it "the sweet oil of vitriol."

At around the same time, Swiss physician Paracelsus discovered the anaesthetizing properties of ether.

STEAM TURBINE (1551).

The brilliant Turkish polymath Taqi al-Din described a functioning steam turbine, designed to power a rotating spit, in his wonderfully t.i.tled 1551 opus, The Sublime Methods in Spiritual Devices The Sublime Methods in Spiritual Devices.

PENCIL (1560).

In the mid 1560s, the residents of a small village in England's c.u.mbria region stumbled across a ma.s.sive deposit of graphite. The community first began using the substance to mark their cattle and sheep, and ultimately hit upon wrapping a wood casing around the graphite. It would take another two hundred years for the device to be completed with the invention of the eraser.

MERCATOR MAP PROJECTION (1569).

Flemish mapmaker Gerard Mercator developed the Mercator projection, a cartographical depiction of the world that allowed navigators to follow rhumb lines between two locations, thus accounting for compa.s.s bearing.

SUPERNOVAS AND COMETS (1572-1577) The Danish n.o.bleman Tycho Brahe's observation of a new star forming in 1572, and his detailed proof that the supernova was not changing position relative to other stars, undermined the prevailing orthodoxy that held that the heavens were incapable of change. Several years later, Brahe's equally precise observations of a comet showed that the object was farther away from the moon, and thus not part of earth's atmosphere.

STOCKING FRAME (1589).

English clergyman William Lee created the first working version of a stocking frame, a mechanical knitting machine used in the textile industry to mimic the motions of hand-knitting. Following the inventor's death, one of his a.s.sistants made a number of improvements on the device that much improved its functionality.

COMPOUND MICROSCOPE (1590).

Though a definite consensus does not exist on who invented the compound microscope, most historians credit either the Dutch spectacle maker Zacharias Janssen and his son Hans, or the German optician Hans Lippershey. In 1609 Galileo re-formed Janssen's original design into a more efficient machine. In the 1670s, Antoni van Leeuwenhoek first applied the microscope to the field of biology.

FLUSH TOILET (1596).