I recently re-read Steven Johnson‘s Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation, curious to know how well his material has held up since its publication in 2010. My conclusion? If anything, his insights are more relevant now than they were then.

Johnson identifies and discusses these “Seven Key Principles”:

1. The adjacent possible: At any given moment, extraordinary change is possible but that only certain changes can occur (this describes those who create ideas that are ahead of their time and whose ideas reach their ultimate potential years later).

2. Liquid networks: Connections that enable ideas to be born, to be nurtured and to blossom and how these networks are formed and grown.

3. The slow hunch: Creativity doesn’t guarantee an instant flash of insight but rather, germinates over time before manifesting.

4. Serendipity: While happy accidents help allow creativity to flourish, it is the nature of how our ideas are freely shared, how they connect with other ideas and how we perceive the connection at a specific moment that creates profound results.

5. Error: Some of our greatest ideas didn’t come as a result of a flash of insight that followed a number of brilliant successes but rather, that some of those successes come as a result of one or more spectacular failures that produced a brilliant result.

6. Exaptation: Seizing existing components or ideas and repurposing them for a completely different use (for example, using a GPS unit to find your way to a reunion with a long-lost friend when GPS technology was originally created to help us accurately bomb another country into oblivion).

7. Platforms: Adapting many layers of existing knowledge, components, delivery mechanisms and such that in themselves may not be unique but which can be recombined or leveraged into something new that is unique or novel.

Here’s a point I presume to add: These and other sources are constantly sending “messages” that are essentially worthless to you unless you have your “receiver” on and are paying attention, “connect the dots.” For example:

o George Mestral was removing burrs from his dog’s hair after a walk in the woods: Velcro
o Betty Nesmith was using water-based tempera (gesso) to paint over typing errors: Liquid Paper
o Mary Kay Ash used leather softener to eliminate wrinkles in her skin: then she added a fragrance…

I also highly recommend Johnson’s more recently published book, How We Got to Now: Six Innovations That Made the Modern World, also published by Riverhead Press.

Steven Johnson is the best-selling author of seven books on the intersection of science, technology and personal experience. His writings have influenced everything from the way political campaigns use the Internet, to cutting-edge ideas in urban planning, to the battle against 21st-century terrorism. In 2010, he was chosen by Prospect magazine as one of the “Top Ten Brains of the Digital Future.”

Steven has also co-created three influential web sites: the pioneering online magazine FEED, the Webby-Award-winning community site, Plastic.com, and most recently the hyperlocal media site outside.in, which was acquired by AOL in 2011. He serves on the advisory boards of a number of Internet-related companies, including Meetup.com, Betaworks, and Nerve.