The Innovator's Cookbook: Essentials for Inventing What is Next - Softcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Steven Johnson is the author of the bestsellers Where Good Ideas Come From,The Invention of Air, The Ghost Map, Everything Bad Is Good For You, and Mind Wide Open, as well as Emergence and Interface Culture. He is the founder of a variety of influential websites-most recently, outside.in-and writes for Time, Wired, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal. He lives in Marin County, California, with his wife and three sons.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright Page

Introduction

ESSAYS

The Discipline of Innovation

“Nobody Cares What You Do in There”: The Low Road

How to Kill Creativity

The Rise of the Creative Class

The Rules of Innovation

Customers as Innovators

Innovation Blowback: Disruptive Management Practices from Asia

The Process of Social Innovation

Venturesome Consumption

INNOVATORSAT WORK

A Conversation with Brian Eno

A Conversation with Beth Noveck

A Conversation with Jon Schnur

A Conversation with Tom Kelley

A Conversation with Katie Salen

A Conversation with Ray Ozzie

CREDITS AND PERMISSIONS

ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS

Also by Steven Johnson

Also by Steven Johnson

Interface Culture: How New Technology Transforms the Way We Create and Communicate

Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software

Mind Wide Open: Your Brain and the Neuroscience of Everyday Life

Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today’s Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter

The Ghost Map: The Story of London’s Most Terrifying Epidemic—and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World

The Invention of Air: A Story of Science, Faith, Revolution, and the Birth of America

Where Good Ideas Come From

RIVERHEAD BOOKS

Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)

Penguin Books Ltd., 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

Penguin Group Ireland, 25 St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd.)

Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty. Ltd.)

Penguin Books India Pvt. Ltd., 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi—110 017, India

Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, Auckland 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd.)

Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty.) Ltd., 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers and Internet addresses at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors, or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

THE INNOVATOR’S COOKBOOK

A continuation of this copyright page appears on page 257

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions. RIVERHEAD is a registered trademark of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

The RIVERHEAD logo is a trademark of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

First Riverhead trade paperback edition: October 2011

ISBN: 9781101550380

INTRODUCTION

The first step in winning the future is encouraging
American innovation.

—BARACK OBAMA, STATE OF THE UNION ADDRESS, JANUARY 20II

I first began working explicitly on the problem of innovation in the summer of 2006, when I started writing a book about new ideas and the environments that encouraged them. But it wasn’t until I finished that book that I realized I had been wrestling with innovation, in one way or another, for almost two decades. The first articles I published in my twenties as an easily distracted English-lit grad student gravitated toward the digital revolutions coming out of Silicon Valley; all my books since then have focused on new ideas and their transformative power—innovations in science or tech or politics or entertainment, some of them recent headlines and some ancient history.

That long history with the topic may help explain why I assumed almost by default, as I was writing the innovation book, that there was nothing particularly timely about the subject matter, nothing distinct to the zeitgeist of postmillennial culture. Sure, we routinely lavish praise on and pen hagiographies about entrepreneurs like Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg, but we did the same for Thomas Edison and Ben Franklin before them. I had written books that I consciously thought of as zeitgeist-y as I was working on them. Innovation wasn’t like that. This was, in fact, one of the things I found refreshing about the topic. Innovation wasn’t trendy; it was evergreen.

But then something seemed to happen, as the world economy began to climb its way out of the Great Crunch of 2008 to 2009, and we began to probe through the rubble looking for clues to explain what had brought on such a colossal failure, clues that might also, we hoped, suggest ways to avoid similar failures in the future. After a decade of financial pseudo innovation—the creditdefault swaps and collateralized debt obligations that inflated the housing bubble and nearly brought down the world economy when that bubble inevitably burst—it seemed suddenly, viscerally clear that economic growth needed to come from making useful things again, whether those things were electric cars or digital code, and not just creating illusory value out of complex derivative schemes.

I saw this firsthand in the United States, and to a lesser extent in the UK, but I suspect the pattern extends throughout the world. By the time I had finished the final draft of my book, innovation seemed to be on everyone’s lips: public school superintendents, venture capitalists, clean-energy entrepreneurs, op-ed writers. And so when President Obama delivered his State of the Union address in January of 2011, it was not terribly surprising to see him devote nearly a third of the speech to innovation-related initiatives. The speech is worth quoting from in some length, because the way that he frames the issue tells us something important about why innovation seems so central to us today:

The first step in winning the future is encouraging American innovation. None of us can predict with certainty what the next big industry will be or where the new jobs will come from. Thirty years ago, we couldn’t know that something called the Internet would lead to an economic revolution. What we can do—what America does better than anyone else—is spark the creativity and imagination of our people. We’re the nation that put cars in driveways and computers in offices; the nation of Edison and the Wright brothers; of Google and Facebook. In America, innovation doesn’t just change our lives. It is how we make our living.

Our free-enterprise system is what drives innovation. But because it’s not always profitable for companies to invest in basic research, throughout our history, our government has provided cutting-edge scientists and inventors with the support that they need. That’s what planted the seeds for the Internet....