Where Do Good Ideas in China Come From? An Essay About the Characteristics of Eastern and Western Innovation Frame Conditions.
Abstract
This essay reviews Stephen Johnson’s title “Where Do Good Ideas Come From? A Natural History of Innovation; Johnson’s claim that openness and connectivity are more valuable to innovation than purely competitive mechanisms. He is challenged by the assumption that Johnson’s writes from a Western perspective only and does not take into account different dynamics and economic evolution of Eastern societies, in particular China. It is moreover suggested that Johnson’s theory is Marxist in its essence and overlooks the reality of human behavior, i.e. no development without motivation and lack of enlightened leaders who distribute wealth evenly. Proprietary research and “survival of the fittest” competition will therefore continue to be more dominant contributors to innovation than openness and connectivity, unless a profound consciousness leap takes place, in particular in China.
Introduction
I am on a plane from Shanghai to Shenyang, which took off with a three hours delay. Waiting at Hongqiao airport was grueling; I did not know what to do with myself and my mind was blank. I have that state of mind quite often in Shanghai and attribute it to the city’s density both in terms of population, thick air and lack of being in touch with nature, which is one of my main sources for inspiration. Such a state of mind usually tends to change quickly once the airplane has taken off and gained some altitude. Then my mind clears up and I sometimes have the perception that increasing altitude brings me closer to the mind at large. I get inspired and new thoughts or old ones in new compositions trickle into my small mind.
Lately I have had Stephen Johnson’s 2010 book “Where Do Good Ideas Come From?” a lot on my mind. I finished it yesterday night, but today it comes back in an unforeseen moment sitting on aisle seat 39C. It’s my row’s turn and the flight attendant asks about drinks. Window seat 39A orders coffee. Middle seat 39B orders coffee. I order green tea. It is in this moment that I make again a connection between where good ideas come from and the massive change in nutritional habits that the population of this country experienced over the last three decades.
Inspired to write a review on Johnson’s book, which he crafted from a completely Western - even US only – perspective, I will add to this review my own partly Eastern perspective. After living in China on and off since almost 15 years, it seems to me that many of Johnson’s observations are made for the Western world only and in particular from the perspective of a nation that has experienced industrialization for more than 150 or more years. Economic, sociological and political assumptions, which are as far as I can tell correct for the West don’t apply to China, foremost because it started its path into modernity approximately 200 years later than Britain. So here we go.
Review
Stephen Johnson analyses in his book the characteristics of spaces in which good ideas are generated and makes some remarkable discoveries, which he categorizes into seven elements conducive to creativity. For a visualized explanation watch this youtube animation.
I have rarely read a non-fiction book that so brilliantly cuts through many different disciplines with always one issue in focus. This accomplishment is explained in the book itself with the application of a new version of the enlightenment period commonplace notebook, a software called DEVONthink, which enables modern writers, researchers, teachers, and other well organized people to arrange their information in an easily accessible – and connected - way. I reckon that Johnson made thousands of electronic notes for his journey through reefs, cities and the web, the three spaces that he analyses in depth; for they have one thing in common: they are home to extraordinary creativity and innovation.
The book itself is made up out of nine chapters, one for each of the aforementioned idea generating elements, an introduction and a conclusion. The introduction connects the reader with Charles Darwin’s journey on the Beagle and the development of his theory on the “Origin of Species” as well as with the concept of the organic reef as a biosphere of outstanding creativity. Johnson also introduces a second tool for coming in such a wide range of disciplines to his conclusions, the cross-disciplinary long zoom approach. Johnson writes:
I call that vantage point the long zoom. It can be imagined as a kind of hourglass: As you descend toward the center of the glass, the biological scales contract: from the global, deep time of evolution to the microscopic exchanges of neurons or DNA. At the center of the glass, the perspective shifts from nature to culture, and the scales widen: from individual thoughts and private workspaces to immense cities and global information networks. When we look at the history of innovation from the vantage point of the long zoom, what we find is that unusually generative environments display similar patterns of creativity at multiple scales simultaneously.
He also gives in the introduction an outline of his concept of innovation, which he puts forth in the concluding chapter: Analyzing innovation on the scale of individuals and organizations—as the standard textbooks do—distorts our view. It creates a picture of innovation that overstates the role of proprietary research and “survival of the fittest” competition. The long-zoom approach lets us see that openness and connectivity may, in the end, be more valuable to innovation than purely competitive mechanisms.
I could not agree more with him, but it will be a – very - long way to go for humanity at large. In particular if we consider that openness and connectivity increase mainly in the West, but competitive mechanism continue to be the rule in the East. The history of innovation turns here into a history of mankind’s evolution of consciousness. Johnson’s concept is moreover in its essence Marxist. It fails to recognize the realities of human behavior, which is generally based on incentives that give a personal advantage. As long as society does not change into an utopian place where people are foremost motivated in their work by purpose, where more individuals strive and actually find their vocation, and where enlightened leaders distribute available wealth more equally, competition will remain the major driving force of innovation. Until then it is just remarkable how China adds new dynamics to traditional competition with its state-controlled industry support. By pushing e.g. into the NEV market with all its might, existing patent groups around traditional combustion engines which have blocked further innovation in the automotive industry loose their grip. Before we will see more innovation based on openness and connectivity, we will see a technology market dominated by Chinese multi-nationals alike Huawei or Sanyi. And only when China eventually evolves into an open and truly international connected society, we will see a period of innovation, which resembles what Johnson envisions.
The great Chinese scholar Lin Yutang once wrote: The Chinese are a nation of individualists. They are family-minded, not social-minded, and the family mind is only a form of magnified selfishness. It is curious that the word “society” does not exist as an idea in Chinese thought. In the Confucian social and political philosophy we see a direct transition from the family, chia, to the state, kuo, as successive stages of human organization, as in such sayings as “When the family is orderly, then the state is peaceful,” or “Put the family in order and rule the state in peace.” The nearest equivalent to the notion of society is then a compound of the two words, kuochia, or “state-family” in accordance with the rule for forming Chinese abstract terms.
Western conservatives will applaud to such a philosophical foundation for state rule. But with the current emergence of Neo-Confucianism, Neo-Maoism and persisting nationalism which has taken in terms of internet control the form of Cyber-Leninism it is highly questionable if openness to or connectivity with the rest of the world are part of the political and commercial elite’s mindset. It is not surprising then that some commentators compare the CCP to the Republican tea party. Stephen Johnson won’t have thought of the one or other as the ideal political turf to grow his utopian vision of future innovation hotbeds.
The Adjacent Possible
Recall the question we began with: What kind of environment creates good ideas? The simplest way to answer it is this: innovative environments are better at helping their inhabitants explore the adjacent possible, because they expose a wide and diverse sample of spare parts—mechanical or conceptual—and they encourage novel ways of recombining those parts. Environments that block or limit those new combinations—by punishing experimentation, by obscuring certain branches of possibility, by making the current state so satisfying that no one bothers to explore the edges—will, on average, generate and circulate fewer innovations than environments that encourage exploration.
Challenging problems don’t usually define their adjacent possible in such a clear, tangible way. Part of coming up with a good idea is discovering what those spare parts are, and ensuring that you’re not just recycling the same old ingredients. This, then, is where the next six patterns of innovation will take us, because they all involve, in one way or another, tactics for assembling a more eclectic collection of building block ideas, spare parts that can be reassembled into useful new configurations. The trick to having good ideas is not to sit around in glorious isolation and try to think big thoughts. The trick is to get more parts on the table.
Liquid Networks
No doubt some ingenious hunter-gatherer stumbled across the cleansing properties of ashes mixed with animal fat, or dreamed of building aqueducts in those long eons before the rise of cities, and we simply have no record of his epiphany. But the lack of a record is exactly the point. In a low-density, chaotic network, ideas come and go. In the dense networks of the first cities, good ideas have a natural propensity to get into circulation. They spill over, and through that spilling they are preserved for future generations. For reasons we will see, high-density liquid networks make it easier for innovation to happen, but they also serve the essential function of storing those innovations. Before writing, before books, before Wikipedia, the liquid network of cities preserved the accumulated wisdom of human culture.
The Slow Hunch
Keeping a slow hunch alive poses challenges on multiple scales. For starters, you have to preserve the hunch in your own memory, in the dense network of your neurons. Most slow hunches never last long enough to turn into something useful, because they pass in and out of our memory too quickly, precisely because they possess a certain murkiness. You get a feeling that there’s an interesting avenue to explore, a problem that might someday lead you to a solution, but then you get distracted by more pressing matters and the hunch disappears. So part of the secret of hunch cultivation is simple: write everything down.
Serendipity
According to Mirriam Webster “the occurrence and development of events by chance in a happy or beneficial way.” The brain is serendipitous during sleep and sometimes during a stroll in nature. Carl Gustav Jung used the term synchronicity for a similar concept: the simultaneous occurrence of events which appear significantly related but have no discernible causal connection.
While the creative walk can produce new serendipitous combinations of existing ideas in our heads, we can also cultivate serendipity in the way that we absorb new ideas from the outside world. Reading remains an unsurpassed vehicle for the transmission of interesting new ideas and perspectives. But those of us who aren’t scholars or involved in the publishing business are only able to block out time to read around the edges of our work schedule: listening to an audio book during the morning commute, or taking in a chapter after the kids are down. The problem with assimilating new ideas at the fringes of your daily routine is that the potential combinations are limited by the reach of your memory. If it takes you two weeks to finish a book, by the time you get to the next book, you’ve forgotten much of what was so interesting or provocative about the original one. You can immerse yourself in a single author’s perspective, but then it’s harder to create serendipitous collisions between the ideas of multiple authors. One way around this limitation is to carve out dedicated periods where you read a large and varied collection of books and essays in a condensed amount of time.
The premise that innovation prospers when ideas can serendipitously connect and recombine with other ideas, when hunches can stumble across other hunches that successfully fill in their blanks, may seem like an obvious truth, but the strange fact is that a great deal of the past two centuries of legal and folk wisdom about innovation has pursued the exact opposite argument, building walls between ideas, keeping them from the kind of random, serendipitous connections that exist in dreams and in the organic compounds of life. Ironically, those walls have been erected with the explicit aim of encouraging innovation. They go by many names: patents, digital rights management, intellectual property, trade secrets, proprietary technology. But they share a founding assumption: that in the long run, innovation will increase if you put restrictions on the spread of new ideas, because those restrictions will allow the creators to collect large financial rewards from their inventions. And those rewards will then attract other innovators to follow in their path.
But that secrecy, as we have seen, comes with great cost. Protecting ideas from copycats and competitors also protects them from other ideas that might improve them, might transform them from hints and hunches to true innovations. And indeed there is a growing movement in some forward-thinking companies to turn their R&D labs inside out and make them far more transparent than the traditional model.
Error
William James put it, “The error is needed to set off the truth, much as a dark background is required for exhibiting the brightness of a picture.”
Good ideas are more likely to emerge in environments that contain a certain amount of noise and error. You would think that innovation would be more strongly correlated with the values of accuracy, clarity, and focus. A good idea has to be correct on some basic level, and we value good ideas because they tend to have a high signal-to-noise ratio. But that doesn’t mean you want to cultivate those ideas in noise-free environments, because noise-free environments end up being too sterile and predictable in their output. The best innovation labs are always a little contaminated.
But leaving some room for generative error is important, too. Innovative environments thrive on useful mistakes, and suffer when the demands of quality control overwhelm them. Big organizations like to follow perfectionist regimes like Six Sigma and Total Quality Management, entire systems devoted to eliminating error from the conference room or the assembly line, but it’s no accident that one of the mantras of the Web startup world is fail faster. It’s not that mistakes are the goal—they’re still mistakes, after all, which is why you want to get through them quickly.
Exaptation
Stephen Jay Gould and Elisabeth Vrba: exaptation. An organism develops a trait optimized for a specific use, but then the trait gets hijacked for a completely different function.
Cities, then, are environments that are ripe for exaptation, because they cultivate specialized skills and interests, and they create a liquid network where information can leak out of those subcultures, and influence their neighbors in surprising ways.
A world where a diverse mix of distinct professions and passions overlap is a world where exaptations thrive.
Those shared environments often take the form of a real-world public space, what the sociologist Ray Oldenburg famously called the “third place,” a connective environment distinct from the more insular world of home or office. The eighteenth-century English coffeehouse fertilized countless Enlightenment-era innovations; everything from the science of electricity, to the insurance industry, to democracy itself. Freud maintained a celebrated salon Wednesday nights at 19 Berggasse in Vienna, where physicians, philosophers, and scientists gathered to help shape the emerging field of psychoanalysis. Think, too, of the Paris cafés where so much of modernism was born; or the legendary Homebrew Computer Club in the 1970s, where a ragtag assemblage of amateur hobbyists, teenagers, digital entrepreneurs, and academic scientists managed to spark the personal computer revolution. Participants flock to these spaces partly for the camaraderie of others who share their passions, and no doubt that support network increases the engagement and productivity of the group. But encouragement does not necessarily lead to creativity. Collisions do—the collisions that happen when different fields of expertise converge in some shared physical or intellectual space. That’s where the true sparks fly. The modernism of the 1920s exhibited so much cultural innovation in such a short period of time because the writers, poets, artists, and architects were all rubbing shoulders at the same cafés. They weren’t off on separate islands, teaching creative writing seminars or doing design reviews. That physical proximity made the space rich with exaptation: the literary stream of consciousness influencing the dizzying new perspectives of cubism; the futurist embrace of technological speed in poetry shaping new patterns of urban planning.
Platforms
In the language of the last chapter, open networks of academic researchers often create emergent platforms where commercial development becomes possible.
Generative platforms require all the patterns of innovation we have seen over the preceding pages; they need to create a space where hunches and serendipitous collisions and exaptations and recycling can thrive. It is possible to create such a space in a walled garden. But you are far better off situating your platform in a commons.
Government bureaucracies have a long and richly deserved reputation for squelching innovation, but they possess four key elements that may allow them to benefit from the innovation engine of an emergent platform. First, they are repositories of a vast amount of information and services that could be of potential value to ordinary people, if only we could organize it all better. Second, ordinary people have a passionate interest in the kind of information governments deal with, whether it’s data about industrial zoning, health-care services, or crime rates. Third, a long tradition exists of citizens committing time and intellectual energy to tackling problems where there is a perceived civic good at stake. And, finally, the fact that governments are not in the private sector means that they do not feel any competitive pressure to keep their data proprietary.
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 Forth Quadrant > Purpose
Fourth-quadrant innovation creates a new open platform that commercial entities can then build upon, either by repackaging and refining the original breakthrough, or by developing emergent innovations on top of the underlying platform.
That deliberate inefficiency doesn’t exist in the fourth quadrant. No, these non-market, decentralized environments do not have immense paydays to motivate their participants. 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.
Nutrition
If there is anything we are serious about, it is neither religion nor learning, but food. We openly acclaim eating as one of the few joys of this human life.
[Lin Yutang 1935 in My Country and My People]
From Beijing’s elaborate banquet diplomacy and banquet business deals to the ubiquitous greeting of “have you eating yet?” | “chifanlema?” food pervades Chinese political, economic, and cultural life. [Damien Ma and William Adams 2014 in In a Line behind a Billion People: How Scarcity Will Define China’s Ascent in the Next Decade]
Whereas Johnson does bring compelling evidence for where creativity happens and which characteristics those spaces share, he does not make much reference to nutrition - with the single exception of 19th century coffee houses. But our diet is of such a paramount importance and its impact on our creative potentials often so underestimated, that I would like to add this element to Johnson’s seven others.
During a quite ascetic period in my life, which I spent in the Southwest of China more than 10 years ago, I came to understand that man has the everyday choice to live either productive, consumptive or destructive. Periods of long fasting will increase productivity, while periods of overindulgence will reduce productivity and creativity. Excessive consumption will then lead directly to destruction: destruction of one’s body, mind and soul. Often not only our own, but also other’s.
The destruction of our bodies can be tracked down to every single cell and has been medically described as the biological cut: when a single cell loses its ability to digest toxins naturally, they will be stored within the cell and are then the fertilizer for neoplasm, which then turns into cancer. With the exception of genetically caused or environmental pollution derived cancer, all oncological diseases are essentially diseases of an affluent society. The documentary planeat includes a diet study, which was carried out in China during the 70ies if I remember correctly. One of the striking findings of that study was that famine and cancer never go hand in hand like affluence and cancer do.
The essential gist of this understanding lies in the notion that our body, and in a holistic view thus also our mind, is a vessel that serves the purpose of channeling energy. Both, Taoists and traditional oriental physicians knew about this relationship between Tao and Te and therefore prescribed herbs or practiced techniques that reinstalled the harmonious flow of energy between the individual and nature. This concept might sound vague, but to everyone who has undergone a weeklong fasting retreat, it is nothing new. I will limit my thoughts on nutrition in this chapter mostly to one substance, which has become in recent years such a splendid symbol of China’s growth: coffee.
Johnson’s eloquent and entertaining TED talk saves lazy readers the effort to understand why coffee houses were innovation hot beds, where information spillover used to happen 150 years ago. He remarks quite pointedly that the Western population in the 1850 was essentially all day drunk, because water was not potable. The change from a downer like alcohol to an upper like coffee must not be underestimated. China on the other hand was in the grip of opium at exact the same time which was sold to Chinese merchants by the British in exchange for tea, another, albeit milder, upper. It is a quite interesting picture that I have in my mind comparing the composition of average Western nutrition in the 1850ies and China’s in the 1970ies. I assume that broken down to nutrients, vitamins, the amount of carbon hydrate and proteins, we could see a striking similarity.
I have read somewhere else about the connection between nutrition and economic as well as technological development. Niall Ferguson e.g. made in Civilization a brief comment, David S. Landes mentioned in The Wealth and Poverty of Nations the different diets of WWI Commonwealth soldiers from England and Australia, the first poorly fed with potatoes and short, the later well fed with mutton and tall. Economists usually underestimate the impact of nutrition on mankind. But there is no other human activity than eating and drinking that has a so far reaching impact on this planet. We eat at least three times a day and parts of our societies go at great length to ship food from one end of the world to the other. A biophysicist named Gidon Eshel explains in the documentary planeat, what impact our choice of diet has on this planet in a macroeconomic and ecological perspective. It is without doubt vast.
As far as China is concerned in regard to the future of its general diet choice Damian Ma and William Adams summarize as such: Just as the last three decades of catch-up growth in China created a wealthy middle class, the hundreds of millions of Chinese who will join its ranks in the coming decade are likely to practice catch-up food consumption, particularly of meat. Meat will be an integral part of most meals in a country with a long and resonant cultural fixation on it; vegetarianism seems unlikely to attract mass appeal. Perhaps the expanding middle class’s attitudes toward eating meet will shift for ethical or health purposes. Yet developed East Asian economies with sizable middle classes, from Taiwan to Japan, have not moved to vegetarian diets. Incidentally, Chinese food was the original influence for these East Asian food cultures.
I am sure that similar data like Gidon Eshel’s meat consumption extrapolation could be generated with our drinking habits. Just imagine how our coffee consumption changed global agriculture, entire landscapes and related logistics over the last 150 years. We now ship millions of tons of coffee beans from the Southern hemisphere to the Northern, and it is quite striking that the more North you go (on the Northern hemisphere), the more coffee is being drunk. With the exception of a few former European colonies like Algeria or Brazil, that have adopted the coffee drinking habits as part of their heritage, coffee producing countries usually tend to have much lower consumption than advanced industrialized economies of the Northern hemisphere. See below visualization 1.
This essay reviews Stephen Johnson’s title “Where Do Good Ideas Come From? A Natural History of Innovation; Johnson’s claim that openness and connectivity are more valuable to innovation than purely competitive mechanisms. He is challenged by the assumption that Johnson’s writes from a Western perspective only and does not take into account different dynamics and economic evolution of Eastern societies, in particular China. It is moreover suggested that Johnson’s theory is Marxist in its essence and overlooks the reality of human behavior, i.e. no development without motivation and lack of enlightened leaders who distribute wealth evenly. Proprietary research and “survival of the fittest” competition will therefore continue to be more dominant contributors to innovation than openness and connectivity, unless a profound consciousness leap takes place, in particular in China.
Introduction
I am on a plane from Shanghai to Shenyang, which took off with a three hours delay. Waiting at Hongqiao airport was grueling; I did not know what to do with myself and my mind was blank. I have that state of mind quite often in Shanghai and attribute it to the city’s density both in terms of population, thick air and lack of being in touch with nature, which is one of my main sources for inspiration. Such a state of mind usually tends to change quickly once the airplane has taken off and gained some altitude. Then my mind clears up and I sometimes have the perception that increasing altitude brings me closer to the mind at large. I get inspired and new thoughts or old ones in new compositions trickle into my small mind.
Lately I have had Stephen Johnson’s 2010 book “Where Do Good Ideas Come From?” a lot on my mind. I finished it yesterday night, but today it comes back in an unforeseen moment sitting on aisle seat 39C. It’s my row’s turn and the flight attendant asks about drinks. Window seat 39A orders coffee. Middle seat 39B orders coffee. I order green tea. It is in this moment that I make again a connection between where good ideas come from and the massive change in nutritional habits that the population of this country experienced over the last three decades.
Inspired to write a review on Johnson’s book, which he crafted from a completely Western - even US only – perspective, I will add to this review my own partly Eastern perspective. After living in China on and off since almost 15 years, it seems to me that many of Johnson’s observations are made for the Western world only and in particular from the perspective of a nation that has experienced industrialization for more than 150 or more years. Economic, sociological and political assumptions, which are as far as I can tell correct for the West don’t apply to China, foremost because it started its path into modernity approximately 200 years later than Britain. So here we go.
Review
Stephen Johnson analyses in his book the characteristics of spaces in which good ideas are generated and makes some remarkable discoveries, which he categorizes into seven elements conducive to creativity. For a visualized explanation watch this youtube animation.
- The adjacent possible: the more parts are available, the more likely new things can be created; think e.g. of a soapbox race: you have to build your own race cart. Where will you have more inspiration; in your own basement or at a large junkyard? In Johnson’s words: The trick to having good ideas is not to sit around in glorious isolation and try to think big thoughts. The trick is to get more parts on the table.
- Liquid networks: high density liquid networks like the first cities or the world wide web enable spill over of ideas before they are lost and forgotten.
- The slow hunch: a thought which crosses one’s mind and is not forgotten but sustained and nurtured over a prolonged period of time; eventually it collides with other hunches and is transformed into a novel idea or even a physical innovation.
- Serendipity: the unexpected heureka moment, when a slow hunch got stuck and a missing part of the jigsaw puzzle falls suddenly into place to reveal the picture at large.
- Error: As William James put it, “The error is needed to set off the truth, much as a dark background is required for exhibiting the brightness of a picture.”
- Exaptation: An organism develops a trait optimized for a specific use, but then the trait gets hijacked for a completely different function.
- Platforms: an interdisciplinary exchange of information like Sigmund Freud’s weekly meetings with intellectuals from different fields in the legendary Café Berg forms into an emergent platform, i.e. a hotbed for innovation
I have rarely read a non-fiction book that so brilliantly cuts through many different disciplines with always one issue in focus. This accomplishment is explained in the book itself with the application of a new version of the enlightenment period commonplace notebook, a software called DEVONthink, which enables modern writers, researchers, teachers, and other well organized people to arrange their information in an easily accessible – and connected - way. I reckon that Johnson made thousands of electronic notes for his journey through reefs, cities and the web, the three spaces that he analyses in depth; for they have one thing in common: they are home to extraordinary creativity and innovation.
The book itself is made up out of nine chapters, one for each of the aforementioned idea generating elements, an introduction and a conclusion. The introduction connects the reader with Charles Darwin’s journey on the Beagle and the development of his theory on the “Origin of Species” as well as with the concept of the organic reef as a biosphere of outstanding creativity. Johnson also introduces a second tool for coming in such a wide range of disciplines to his conclusions, the cross-disciplinary long zoom approach. Johnson writes:
I call that vantage point the long zoom. It can be imagined as a kind of hourglass: As you descend toward the center of the glass, the biological scales contract: from the global, deep time of evolution to the microscopic exchanges of neurons or DNA. At the center of the glass, the perspective shifts from nature to culture, and the scales widen: from individual thoughts and private workspaces to immense cities and global information networks. When we look at the history of innovation from the vantage point of the long zoom, what we find is that unusually generative environments display similar patterns of creativity at multiple scales simultaneously.
He also gives in the introduction an outline of his concept of innovation, which he puts forth in the concluding chapter: Analyzing innovation on the scale of individuals and organizations—as the standard textbooks do—distorts our view. It creates a picture of innovation that overstates the role of proprietary research and “survival of the fittest” competition. The long-zoom approach lets us see that openness and connectivity may, in the end, be more valuable to innovation than purely competitive mechanisms.
I could not agree more with him, but it will be a – very - long way to go for humanity at large. In particular if we consider that openness and connectivity increase mainly in the West, but competitive mechanism continue to be the rule in the East. The history of innovation turns here into a history of mankind’s evolution of consciousness. Johnson’s concept is moreover in its essence Marxist. It fails to recognize the realities of human behavior, which is generally based on incentives that give a personal advantage. As long as society does not change into an utopian place where people are foremost motivated in their work by purpose, where more individuals strive and actually find their vocation, and where enlightened leaders distribute available wealth more equally, competition will remain the major driving force of innovation. Until then it is just remarkable how China adds new dynamics to traditional competition with its state-controlled industry support. By pushing e.g. into the NEV market with all its might, existing patent groups around traditional combustion engines which have blocked further innovation in the automotive industry loose their grip. Before we will see more innovation based on openness and connectivity, we will see a technology market dominated by Chinese multi-nationals alike Huawei or Sanyi. And only when China eventually evolves into an open and truly international connected society, we will see a period of innovation, which resembles what Johnson envisions.
The great Chinese scholar Lin Yutang once wrote: The Chinese are a nation of individualists. They are family-minded, not social-minded, and the family mind is only a form of magnified selfishness. It is curious that the word “society” does not exist as an idea in Chinese thought. In the Confucian social and political philosophy we see a direct transition from the family, chia, to the state, kuo, as successive stages of human organization, as in such sayings as “When the family is orderly, then the state is peaceful,” or “Put the family in order and rule the state in peace.” The nearest equivalent to the notion of society is then a compound of the two words, kuochia, or “state-family” in accordance with the rule for forming Chinese abstract terms.
Western conservatives will applaud to such a philosophical foundation for state rule. But with the current emergence of Neo-Confucianism, Neo-Maoism and persisting nationalism which has taken in terms of internet control the form of Cyber-Leninism it is highly questionable if openness to or connectivity with the rest of the world are part of the political and commercial elite’s mindset. It is not surprising then that some commentators compare the CCP to the Republican tea party. Stephen Johnson won’t have thought of the one or other as the ideal political turf to grow his utopian vision of future innovation hotbeds.
The Adjacent Possible
Recall the question we began with: What kind of environment creates good ideas? The simplest way to answer it is this: innovative environments are better at helping their inhabitants explore the adjacent possible, because they expose a wide and diverse sample of spare parts—mechanical or conceptual—and they encourage novel ways of recombining those parts. Environments that block or limit those new combinations—by punishing experimentation, by obscuring certain branches of possibility, by making the current state so satisfying that no one bothers to explore the edges—will, on average, generate and circulate fewer innovations than environments that encourage exploration.
Challenging problems don’t usually define their adjacent possible in such a clear, tangible way. Part of coming up with a good idea is discovering what those spare parts are, and ensuring that you’re not just recycling the same old ingredients. This, then, is where the next six patterns of innovation will take us, because they all involve, in one way or another, tactics for assembling a more eclectic collection of building block ideas, spare parts that can be reassembled into useful new configurations. The trick to having good ideas is not to sit around in glorious isolation and try to think big thoughts. The trick is to get more parts on the table.
Liquid Networks
No doubt some ingenious hunter-gatherer stumbled across the cleansing properties of ashes mixed with animal fat, or dreamed of building aqueducts in those long eons before the rise of cities, and we simply have no record of his epiphany. But the lack of a record is exactly the point. In a low-density, chaotic network, ideas come and go. In the dense networks of the first cities, good ideas have a natural propensity to get into circulation. They spill over, and through that spilling they are preserved for future generations. For reasons we will see, high-density liquid networks make it easier for innovation to happen, but they also serve the essential function of storing those innovations. Before writing, before books, before Wikipedia, the liquid network of cities preserved the accumulated wisdom of human culture.
The Slow Hunch
Keeping a slow hunch alive poses challenges on multiple scales. For starters, you have to preserve the hunch in your own memory, in the dense network of your neurons. Most slow hunches never last long enough to turn into something useful, because they pass in and out of our memory too quickly, precisely because they possess a certain murkiness. You get a feeling that there’s an interesting avenue to explore, a problem that might someday lead you to a solution, but then you get distracted by more pressing matters and the hunch disappears. So part of the secret of hunch cultivation is simple: write everything down.
Serendipity
According to Mirriam Webster “the occurrence and development of events by chance in a happy or beneficial way.” The brain is serendipitous during sleep and sometimes during a stroll in nature. Carl Gustav Jung used the term synchronicity for a similar concept: the simultaneous occurrence of events which appear significantly related but have no discernible causal connection.
While the creative walk can produce new serendipitous combinations of existing ideas in our heads, we can also cultivate serendipity in the way that we absorb new ideas from the outside world. Reading remains an unsurpassed vehicle for the transmission of interesting new ideas and perspectives. But those of us who aren’t scholars or involved in the publishing business are only able to block out time to read around the edges of our work schedule: listening to an audio book during the morning commute, or taking in a chapter after the kids are down. The problem with assimilating new ideas at the fringes of your daily routine is that the potential combinations are limited by the reach of your memory. If it takes you two weeks to finish a book, by the time you get to the next book, you’ve forgotten much of what was so interesting or provocative about the original one. You can immerse yourself in a single author’s perspective, but then it’s harder to create serendipitous collisions between the ideas of multiple authors. One way around this limitation is to carve out dedicated periods where you read a large and varied collection of books and essays in a condensed amount of time.
The premise that innovation prospers when ideas can serendipitously connect and recombine with other ideas, when hunches can stumble across other hunches that successfully fill in their blanks, may seem like an obvious truth, but the strange fact is that a great deal of the past two centuries of legal and folk wisdom about innovation has pursued the exact opposite argument, building walls between ideas, keeping them from the kind of random, serendipitous connections that exist in dreams and in the organic compounds of life. Ironically, those walls have been erected with the explicit aim of encouraging innovation. They go by many names: patents, digital rights management, intellectual property, trade secrets, proprietary technology. But they share a founding assumption: that in the long run, innovation will increase if you put restrictions on the spread of new ideas, because those restrictions will allow the creators to collect large financial rewards from their inventions. And those rewards will then attract other innovators to follow in their path.
But that secrecy, as we have seen, comes with great cost. Protecting ideas from copycats and competitors also protects them from other ideas that might improve them, might transform them from hints and hunches to true innovations. And indeed there is a growing movement in some forward-thinking companies to turn their R&D labs inside out and make them far more transparent than the traditional model.
Error
William James put it, “The error is needed to set off the truth, much as a dark background is required for exhibiting the brightness of a picture.”
Good ideas are more likely to emerge in environments that contain a certain amount of noise and error. You would think that innovation would be more strongly correlated with the values of accuracy, clarity, and focus. A good idea has to be correct on some basic level, and we value good ideas because they tend to have a high signal-to-noise ratio. But that doesn’t mean you want to cultivate those ideas in noise-free environments, because noise-free environments end up being too sterile and predictable in their output. The best innovation labs are always a little contaminated.
But leaving some room for generative error is important, too. Innovative environments thrive on useful mistakes, and suffer when the demands of quality control overwhelm them. Big organizations like to follow perfectionist regimes like Six Sigma and Total Quality Management, entire systems devoted to eliminating error from the conference room or the assembly line, but it’s no accident that one of the mantras of the Web startup world is fail faster. It’s not that mistakes are the goal—they’re still mistakes, after all, which is why you want to get through them quickly.
Exaptation
Stephen Jay Gould and Elisabeth Vrba: exaptation. An organism develops a trait optimized for a specific use, but then the trait gets hijacked for a completely different function.
Cities, then, are environments that are ripe for exaptation, because they cultivate specialized skills and interests, and they create a liquid network where information can leak out of those subcultures, and influence their neighbors in surprising ways.
A world where a diverse mix of distinct professions and passions overlap is a world where exaptations thrive.
Those shared environments often take the form of a real-world public space, what the sociologist Ray Oldenburg famously called the “third place,” a connective environment distinct from the more insular world of home or office. The eighteenth-century English coffeehouse fertilized countless Enlightenment-era innovations; everything from the science of electricity, to the insurance industry, to democracy itself. Freud maintained a celebrated salon Wednesday nights at 19 Berggasse in Vienna, where physicians, philosophers, and scientists gathered to help shape the emerging field of psychoanalysis. Think, too, of the Paris cafés where so much of modernism was born; or the legendary Homebrew Computer Club in the 1970s, where a ragtag assemblage of amateur hobbyists, teenagers, digital entrepreneurs, and academic scientists managed to spark the personal computer revolution. Participants flock to these spaces partly for the camaraderie of others who share their passions, and no doubt that support network increases the engagement and productivity of the group. But encouragement does not necessarily lead to creativity. Collisions do—the collisions that happen when different fields of expertise converge in some shared physical or intellectual space. That’s where the true sparks fly. The modernism of the 1920s exhibited so much cultural innovation in such a short period of time because the writers, poets, artists, and architects were all rubbing shoulders at the same cafés. They weren’t off on separate islands, teaching creative writing seminars or doing design reviews. That physical proximity made the space rich with exaptation: the literary stream of consciousness influencing the dizzying new perspectives of cubism; the futurist embrace of technological speed in poetry shaping new patterns of urban planning.
Platforms
In the language of the last chapter, open networks of academic researchers often create emergent platforms where commercial development becomes possible.
Generative platforms require all the patterns of innovation we have seen over the preceding pages; they need to create a space where hunches and serendipitous collisions and exaptations and recycling can thrive. It is possible to create such a space in a walled garden. But you are far better off situating your platform in a commons.
Government bureaucracies have a long and richly deserved reputation for squelching innovation, but they possess four key elements that may allow them to benefit from the innovation engine of an emergent platform. First, they are repositories of a vast amount of information and services that could be of potential value to ordinary people, if only we could organize it all better. Second, ordinary people have a passionate interest in the kind of information governments deal with, whether it’s data about industrial zoning, health-care services, or crime rates. Third, a long tradition exists of citizens committing time and intellectual energy to tackling problems where there is a perceived civic good at stake. And, finally, the fact that governments are not in the private sector means that they do not feel any competitive pressure to keep their data proprietary.
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 Forth Quadrant > Purpose
Fourth-quadrant innovation creates a new open platform that commercial entities can then build upon, either by repackaging and refining the original breakthrough, or by developing emergent innovations on top of the underlying platform.
That deliberate inefficiency doesn’t exist in the fourth quadrant. No, these non-market, decentralized environments do not have immense paydays to motivate their participants. 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.
Nutrition
If there is anything we are serious about, it is neither religion nor learning, but food. We openly acclaim eating as one of the few joys of this human life.
[Lin Yutang 1935 in My Country and My People]
From Beijing’s elaborate banquet diplomacy and banquet business deals to the ubiquitous greeting of “have you eating yet?” | “chifanlema?” food pervades Chinese political, economic, and cultural life. [Damien Ma and William Adams 2014 in In a Line behind a Billion People: How Scarcity Will Define China’s Ascent in the Next Decade]
Whereas Johnson does bring compelling evidence for where creativity happens and which characteristics those spaces share, he does not make much reference to nutrition - with the single exception of 19th century coffee houses. But our diet is of such a paramount importance and its impact on our creative potentials often so underestimated, that I would like to add this element to Johnson’s seven others.
During a quite ascetic period in my life, which I spent in the Southwest of China more than 10 years ago, I came to understand that man has the everyday choice to live either productive, consumptive or destructive. Periods of long fasting will increase productivity, while periods of overindulgence will reduce productivity and creativity. Excessive consumption will then lead directly to destruction: destruction of one’s body, mind and soul. Often not only our own, but also other’s.
The destruction of our bodies can be tracked down to every single cell and has been medically described as the biological cut: when a single cell loses its ability to digest toxins naturally, they will be stored within the cell and are then the fertilizer for neoplasm, which then turns into cancer. With the exception of genetically caused or environmental pollution derived cancer, all oncological diseases are essentially diseases of an affluent society. The documentary planeat includes a diet study, which was carried out in China during the 70ies if I remember correctly. One of the striking findings of that study was that famine and cancer never go hand in hand like affluence and cancer do.
The essential gist of this understanding lies in the notion that our body, and in a holistic view thus also our mind, is a vessel that serves the purpose of channeling energy. Both, Taoists and traditional oriental physicians knew about this relationship between Tao and Te and therefore prescribed herbs or practiced techniques that reinstalled the harmonious flow of energy between the individual and nature. This concept might sound vague, but to everyone who has undergone a weeklong fasting retreat, it is nothing new. I will limit my thoughts on nutrition in this chapter mostly to one substance, which has become in recent years such a splendid symbol of China’s growth: coffee.
Johnson’s eloquent and entertaining TED talk saves lazy readers the effort to understand why coffee houses were innovation hot beds, where information spillover used to happen 150 years ago. He remarks quite pointedly that the Western population in the 1850 was essentially all day drunk, because water was not potable. The change from a downer like alcohol to an upper like coffee must not be underestimated. China on the other hand was in the grip of opium at exact the same time which was sold to Chinese merchants by the British in exchange for tea, another, albeit milder, upper. It is a quite interesting picture that I have in my mind comparing the composition of average Western nutrition in the 1850ies and China’s in the 1970ies. I assume that broken down to nutrients, vitamins, the amount of carbon hydrate and proteins, we could see a striking similarity.
I have read somewhere else about the connection between nutrition and economic as well as technological development. Niall Ferguson e.g. made in Civilization a brief comment, David S. Landes mentioned in The Wealth and Poverty of Nations the different diets of WWI Commonwealth soldiers from England and Australia, the first poorly fed with potatoes and short, the later well fed with mutton and tall. Economists usually underestimate the impact of nutrition on mankind. But there is no other human activity than eating and drinking that has a so far reaching impact on this planet. We eat at least three times a day and parts of our societies go at great length to ship food from one end of the world to the other. A biophysicist named Gidon Eshel explains in the documentary planeat, what impact our choice of diet has on this planet in a macroeconomic and ecological perspective. It is without doubt vast.
As far as China is concerned in regard to the future of its general diet choice Damian Ma and William Adams summarize as such: Just as the last three decades of catch-up growth in China created a wealthy middle class, the hundreds of millions of Chinese who will join its ranks in the coming decade are likely to practice catch-up food consumption, particularly of meat. Meat will be an integral part of most meals in a country with a long and resonant cultural fixation on it; vegetarianism seems unlikely to attract mass appeal. Perhaps the expanding middle class’s attitudes toward eating meet will shift for ethical or health purposes. Yet developed East Asian economies with sizable middle classes, from Taiwan to Japan, have not moved to vegetarian diets. Incidentally, Chinese food was the original influence for these East Asian food cultures.
I am sure that similar data like Gidon Eshel’s meat consumption extrapolation could be generated with our drinking habits. Just imagine how our coffee consumption changed global agriculture, entire landscapes and related logistics over the last 150 years. We now ship millions of tons of coffee beans from the Southern hemisphere to the Northern, and it is quite striking that the more North you go (on the Northern hemisphere), the more coffee is being drunk. With the exception of a few former European colonies like Algeria or Brazil, that have adopted the coffee drinking habits as part of their heritage, coffee producing countries usually tend to have much lower consumption than advanced industrialized economies of the Northern hemisphere. See below visualization 1.
It is moreover quite striking how a world map of coffee consumption matches a world map on invention patent application density. The below map on coffee consumption shows data from 2013. The second map, which has been generated by one of my former colleagues at a technology transfer agency, shows 2005 data on the total number of patent applications registered at the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) per million inhabitants. As far as patent application can be considered one of the last steps of bringing an invention into the legal realm and public domain, this map certainly provides a valid indicator for technological creativity. The correlation between coffee consumption and patent application activity must be more than a coincidence. See below visualization 2 & 3.
In the peculiar case of China we witness since 1980 an industrial, financial (as described by Niall Ferguson in The Ascent of Money) and nutritional revolution condensed within a timeframe of 40 years in a country 3 times the population of Europe and 5 times the US. Visualization 4 from Vienna Institute of Advanced Studies indicates the tremendous change in the Chinese diet starting in 1960. The study sadly stops in the 1990ies but given that all ingredients that are consumed by an affluent society keep growing in volume, the only change since 1995 would be a rapidly growing consumption of coffee, albeit barely visible because caloric value close to zero if not consumed with milk, alcohol and of course sugar.
Visualization 5 shows the diet pattern of several countries during the same period – again no reference to diet elements with low caloric impact, but otherwise considerable effects on human behavior. The increase in cardiovascular diseases, diabetes, all the health yokes of affluent societies, throughout the Chinese society during the last 30 years are clearly a negative result of this incredibly fast diet change.
Visualization 5 shows the diet pattern of several countries during the same period – again no reference to diet elements with low caloric impact, but otherwise considerable effects on human behavior. The increase in cardiovascular diseases, diabetes, all the health yokes of affluent societies, throughout the Chinese society during the last 30 years are clearly a negative result of this incredibly fast diet change.
I am used to presentations and papers that refer to the growing number of Chinese patent applications and research papers, but I always miss the connection to which socially accepted drugs the innovations were made respectively the papers written on. We are always told these stories, whether in movies (e.g. The Doors) or autobiographic accounts (e.g. Aldous Huxley’s The Doors of Perception), how great art or music was conceived under the influence of drugs, but we are kept in the believe that our innovation societies are thriving on soberness only. If I think of the technology transfer agency, which I called my work space for three years, people were down to the bones addicted to caffeine and would lurch to the department’s Nespresso machine several times a day for yet another shot. One of my colleagues, a physicist, would send around every month an excel sheet to collect the department’s tab orders, and even though we didn’t pay him more than the purchase value, he became to be known as our caffeine dealer.
In our Western world were nutritional habits have changed relatively little since WWII, where coffee and now even energy drinks are part of our daily diet, we tend to forget that much of our societies’ development depends on what we eat and drink. I would even go so far as to attribute WWI to the hubris of European national states, which were at the climax of an industrial revolution fueled by coffee. Yes, I dare to make such a far-fetched argument and attribute a war to a general intoxication of respective decision makers.
If we would examine the psychology of coffee, we would find a substance that reacts more on the right hemisphere of our brain, i.e. having an agonistic impact on our individualistic rational thought, but a rather antagonistic effect on the left hemisphere, which is responsible for empathy based thought. The neurobiologist Jill Bolte Taylor explains this general partition of our brain in an intellectual and an emotional hemisphere brilliantly in her book and TED talk Stroke of Insight.
I sit now in a café at Nanchang airport waiting for my next appointment and I listen to two gentlemen both in their early 50ies discussing different types of coffee. One of them seems to be knowledgeable explaining that a latte is made of three parts, one part milk, one part espresso and one part cappuccino. He does not seem to be a barista, but still knows about that brew more than me. Coffee is not only a new foreign product; it’s also a status symbol, for the modern individual and for an affluent and modern society.
China has been 1990 in terms of industrial development and average nutrition probably where Europe was in 1910 before WWI. Referring to the German philosopher Ernst Bloch’s concept of time space, everything happens on the time axis in China much faster and one year here and now might have been at the current speed ten years in Europe then. It is therefore not surprising that China’s patent office rose during the last decade to the world’s largest and its research paper publications became in many disciplines the world’s most numerous – coinciding with the increased consumption of caffeine, the socially accepted cocaine, as I like to call it.
If China’s coffee consumption continues to grow at current pace it might overtake the US as largest import market within the next decade and will, should it ever reach Japan’s average coffee consumption, then have three times the market volume of the US. Considering that both cultures are somehow similar, the economic outlook for Starbucks and Co. looks indeed very bright. The present already does, as Starbucks declared China it’s second home market. The last time I had to meet a business associate at Beijing South railway station, he asked me to wait at Starbucks. I asked him which, because there where already 6 outlets.
Similar promising is the outlook for energy drink producers, the next step in legal nutritional supplements, which has already been taken in the West during the last 20 years, but which is about to come in China. I have only a few days ago met the Red Bull business development manager for China who confirmed this trend. Red Bull was only in 2013 approved by the Chinese food and drug administration. Were I a cartoonist to illustrate this essay, I would draw a Taiji master furiously practicing with his students next to a few emptied Red Bull cans and Starbucks cups. It is here in the East where modern substance and traditional thought conflict with each most interestingly.
The Economist writes: By volume the output of Chinese science is impressive. Mainland Chinese researchers have published a steadily increasing share of scientific papers in journals included in the prestigious Science Citation Index (SCI—maintained by Thomson Reuters, a publisher). The number grew from a negligible share in 2001 to 9.5% in 2011, second in the world to America, according to a report published by the Institute of Scientific and Technical Information of China. From 2002 to 2012, more than 1m Chinese papers were published in SCI journals; they ranked sixth for the number of times cited by others. Nature, a science journal, reported that in 2012 the number of papers from China in the journal’s 18 affiliated research publications rose by 35% from 2011. The journal said this “adds to the growing body of evidence that China is fast becoming a global leader in scientific publishing and scientific research”.
And of course, I may add, a global leader in coffee consumption.
The Adjacent Possible
Johnson writes about the first of his seven elements conducive to good ideas:
In our work lives, in our creative pursuits, in the organizations that employ us, in the communities we inhabit—in all these different environments, we are surrounded by potential new configurations, new ways of breaking out of our standard routines […] Recall the question we began with: What kind of environment creates good ideas? The simplest way to answer it is this: innovative environments are better at helping their inhabitants explore the adjacent possible, because they expose a wide and diverse sample of spare parts—mechanical or conceptual—and they encourage novel ways of recombining those parts. Environments that block or limit those new combinations—by punishing experimentation, by obscuring certain branches of possibility, by making the current state so satisfying that no one bothers to explore the edges—will, on average, generate and circulate fewer innovations than environments that encourage exploration. […] The trick is to figure out ways to explore the edges of possibility that surround you. This can be as simple as changing the physical environment you work in, or cultivating a specific kind of social network, or maintaining certain habits in the way you seek out and store information.
I am compelled by the concept of the adjacent possible, because it is such a constructivist element. Man’s environment defines his creative potential. He has a choice to change his environment on an individual, systemic, organizational and even societal level. One can leave abusive families, mobbing companies and fascist societies. Each one of us can move towards a more nutrient and creative environment or stay in our private hells; as Johnson puts it:
All of us live inside our own private versions of the adjacent possible.
Johnson concludes his chapter on the adjacent possible as such: Challenging problems don’t usually define their adjacent possible in such a clear, tangible way. Part of coming up with a good idea is discovering what those spare parts are, and ensuring that you’re not just recycling the same old ingredients. This, then, is where the next six patterns of innovation will take us, because they all involve, in one way or another, tactics for assembling a more eclectic collection of building block ideas, spare parts that can be reassembled into useful new configurations. The trick to having good ideas is not to sit around in glorious isolation and try to think big thoughts. The trick is to get more parts on the table.
Liquid Networks
Johnson argues that coffee houses in Paris, Boston, Vienna and Philadelphia were spaces where people from all walks of life met and where spillover happened. I ask myself if China has such spaces. Certainly, modern coffee houses don’t promote the idea of meeting people with different backgrounds, quite on the contrary modern coffee drinkers seem to be quite often a lonesome race, tugged away behind a book or screen, not interacting at all. But in a society where traditionally community is preferred over individuality it is quite astounding that Starbucks has declared China its second home market and many other entrepreneurs still see a promising business opportunity. It must be the substance not the space that makes Chinese go to coffee houses.
A Cultural Tendency for Clustering
If China is a society, which now picks up established nutritional habits of the affluent West, but coffee houses have lost their spillover quality of the golden fin de siècle, where are China’s creative spaces? I have a hunch (to use one of Johnson’s key words) since a few years that China’s liquid networks are home to clusters, which seem to develop here more naturally than in other parts of the known-to-me world. Ever since I attended a biopharmaceutical conference in Shanghai’s Zhangjiang High Tech Park in 2009, I was impressed if not irritated by the density and intimacy of global and national competitors within one such business park. Johnson might argue that such clusters are only one phenomenon of superlinear cities which host exponentially more creatives than small towns, but where else in this world have general managers and heads of RnD of GlaxoSmithKline, Baxter, Novartis, Bayer, Takeda, etc. monthly round tables to exchange their experiences? And this surely in every industry you can think of. I guess both on a private level as expats as well as on a professional level as decision makers and researchers. And where else in the world exists a similarly high fluctuation of well-trained employees? Chinese executives and PhDs, who are in the second or third row of the corporate hierarchy, profit from such thriving interaction and from the opportunity to have similar promising employers within a walk’s reach. More and more move up to be the top dogs or set up their own enterprise and benefit from newly available financial tools. Spillover wherever you look, and for some law geeks an euphemism for intellectual property theft. But people are and will always be the major leak when it comes to unwanted know how transfer.
Shanghai’s Zhangjiang High Tech Park is only one example of a Chinese cluster with the typical characteristics of risk taking entrepreneurship, spillover, networking, etc. which we all know from the Silicon Valley example. Beijing’s Zhongguan Village with its 18000 plus software companies would be another of these national level, government supported clusters that have already gained considerable fame abroad. What is rarely discussed though, is the fact, that clustering is a natural phenomenon in China, quite contrary to the West. You name an industry or a product and you would find that 80% of the companies manufacturing or trading with that product would be located in one town or even one district of a town. Stationary to be found in Zhejiang’s Yiwu, for x-ray equipment go to Guangdong’s Dongguan, Shanghai’s Beijing Road is the place where the end user finds DIY tools, shop after shop offering the same or similar stock. Chinese entrepreneurs seem to have a tendency to flock together within geographical vicinity. I attribute this phenomenon to the basic Chinese concept of community and China’s population density per se.
Shanghai’s Fengxian district is home to a huge industrial area which is neither central nor city government supported. Still it has probably the globally highest density of workshops with laser cutting and laser welding equipment. A German industry expert told me that he was amazed how fast this high-end technology spreads in that area, where every small workshop operates with dangerous equipment without much protection, where broken parts are quickly fixed, sometimes ingeniously, often resulting in poor quality products. Like in all other such industry clusters whether for DIY supply or B2B requests the customer profits from fast response times, 24-7 availability and competitive pricing and has to leverage these benefits by probably lowering his product requirements.
Liquid Networks and Specialization
Clusters foster specialization. Not necessarily, but definitely when competition increases and prices drop. Then, companies have to think about carving out a new profitable turf. Businesses located at the other end of the world will never be able to react as fast as businesses within a cluster; continuous fast reaction can decide over survival or liquidation. I have heard quite often that Chinese companies do a great job when they copy or adapt a foreign technology, because they manage to increase the production efficiency. Maximum output at minimum input. And I am convinced that this proven track record for highly efficient production and management processes is a result of clustering and specialization, two economic phenomena, which are caused by a high population density. In other words: China is innovative because there are many Chinese.
Johnson says: Kleiber’s law proved that as life gets bigger, it slows down. But West’s model demonstrated one crucial way in which human-built cities broke from the patterns of biological life: as cities get bigger, they generate ideas at a faster clip. This is what we call “superlinear scaling”: if creativity scaled with size in a straight, linear fashion, you would of course find more patents and inventions in a larger city, but the number of patents and inventions per capita would be stable. West’s power laws suggested something far more provocative: that despite all the noise and crowding and distraction, the average resident of a metropolis with a population of five million people was almost three times more creative than the average resident of a town of a hundred thousand.
In 2010 I did some research for a paper about industrial automation in China. What I found was a country that was at the verge of transforming itself from the largest manual workbench into the largest automated production line. In 2013 China did take over the US and is since then officially the country with the highest annual sales volume of industrial robots. Still the ratio population vs. robot is low compared to the old, industrialized nations, but the trend is clear. In the course of my current responsibilities I happen to cooperate with many integrators | 集成商, i.e. companies that integrate industrial picking, painting or welding robots for their end customers. It is estimated by industry experts that there are about 4000 integrators in China, about half of them located in the YRD and again about half of those in Wuxi, a million people city between Shanghai and Nanjing.
So much for clustering, but what about specialization? Industry colleagues debate quite a lot what impact such a density of integrators will have on the global market. One thing is already visible: a reverse trend of integrated product flow. Chinese integrators have picked up existing foreign technologies and have started to export their services and products, e.g. Dalian Auto integrates automotive production lines for its clients globally and operates subsidiaries in Germany, Japan and the US to access the OEM headquarters of its clients. The more interesting question though is what we can expect from that volume of integrators in regard to innovation? Integrators sit at the very crossroad of incremental innovation and amusingly or rather not integrated innovation| 集成创新 is one of the three form of recommended innovation which are outlined in the Medium and Long–term National Plan for Science and Technology Development 2006–2020 (short MLP). Due to this high number of competitors, fast specialization is predictable. Chinese entrepreneurs have a proven track record in efficiency maximizing incremental innovation and fast commercialization. This army of integrators will soon be an additional back bone of a giant nation state going international.
Exaptation: Seaturtle not Seaweed
It’s common to ask Chinese expats who return to China whether they are haigui or haidai, cherished seaturtle or despised seaweed. But who is to judge? Whenever somebody returns to one’s home turf after a long stay abroad, he will bring back impressions and experiences from another world and many new perspectives of looking at things whether this is politics, values, business models or the application of technologies. People always carry know how in their minds, people are at the center of the spillover phenomenon. It were the adventurers, pioneers, risk taking entrepreneurs who left Europe for the US before WWI and the great minds that had to leave before and during WWII who built a society that is still being envied by others for its many accomplishments. It might as well be that we will look back at Chinese sea turtles as the people who crafted modern China. The stories abound with Chinese exapting (another of Johnson’s key words) Western technologies or business practices and implementing them successfully in their home country. Two famous examples are Ma Yun, who never lived abroad, but built his taobao empire on a Western business model (and outperforms ebay meanwhile in turnover volume) and Wang Gang, who never built a company, but turned Chinese minister of technology after a 10 year stint in Audi’s German HQ. Whatever industry, there will be a few haigui who have succeeded or are under way to revolutionize China.
In our Western world were nutritional habits have changed relatively little since WWII, where coffee and now even energy drinks are part of our daily diet, we tend to forget that much of our societies’ development depends on what we eat and drink. I would even go so far as to attribute WWI to the hubris of European national states, which were at the climax of an industrial revolution fueled by coffee. Yes, I dare to make such a far-fetched argument and attribute a war to a general intoxication of respective decision makers.
If we would examine the psychology of coffee, we would find a substance that reacts more on the right hemisphere of our brain, i.e. having an agonistic impact on our individualistic rational thought, but a rather antagonistic effect on the left hemisphere, which is responsible for empathy based thought. The neurobiologist Jill Bolte Taylor explains this general partition of our brain in an intellectual and an emotional hemisphere brilliantly in her book and TED talk Stroke of Insight.
I sit now in a café at Nanchang airport waiting for my next appointment and I listen to two gentlemen both in their early 50ies discussing different types of coffee. One of them seems to be knowledgeable explaining that a latte is made of three parts, one part milk, one part espresso and one part cappuccino. He does not seem to be a barista, but still knows about that brew more than me. Coffee is not only a new foreign product; it’s also a status symbol, for the modern individual and for an affluent and modern society.
China has been 1990 in terms of industrial development and average nutrition probably where Europe was in 1910 before WWI. Referring to the German philosopher Ernst Bloch’s concept of time space, everything happens on the time axis in China much faster and one year here and now might have been at the current speed ten years in Europe then. It is therefore not surprising that China’s patent office rose during the last decade to the world’s largest and its research paper publications became in many disciplines the world’s most numerous – coinciding with the increased consumption of caffeine, the socially accepted cocaine, as I like to call it.
If China’s coffee consumption continues to grow at current pace it might overtake the US as largest import market within the next decade and will, should it ever reach Japan’s average coffee consumption, then have three times the market volume of the US. Considering that both cultures are somehow similar, the economic outlook for Starbucks and Co. looks indeed very bright. The present already does, as Starbucks declared China it’s second home market. The last time I had to meet a business associate at Beijing South railway station, he asked me to wait at Starbucks. I asked him which, because there where already 6 outlets.
Similar promising is the outlook for energy drink producers, the next step in legal nutritional supplements, which has already been taken in the West during the last 20 years, but which is about to come in China. I have only a few days ago met the Red Bull business development manager for China who confirmed this trend. Red Bull was only in 2013 approved by the Chinese food and drug administration. Were I a cartoonist to illustrate this essay, I would draw a Taiji master furiously practicing with his students next to a few emptied Red Bull cans and Starbucks cups. It is here in the East where modern substance and traditional thought conflict with each most interestingly.
The Economist writes: By volume the output of Chinese science is impressive. Mainland Chinese researchers have published a steadily increasing share of scientific papers in journals included in the prestigious Science Citation Index (SCI—maintained by Thomson Reuters, a publisher). The number grew from a negligible share in 2001 to 9.5% in 2011, second in the world to America, according to a report published by the Institute of Scientific and Technical Information of China. From 2002 to 2012, more than 1m Chinese papers were published in SCI journals; they ranked sixth for the number of times cited by others. Nature, a science journal, reported that in 2012 the number of papers from China in the journal’s 18 affiliated research publications rose by 35% from 2011. The journal said this “adds to the growing body of evidence that China is fast becoming a global leader in scientific publishing and scientific research”.
And of course, I may add, a global leader in coffee consumption.
The Adjacent Possible
Johnson writes about the first of his seven elements conducive to good ideas:
In our work lives, in our creative pursuits, in the organizations that employ us, in the communities we inhabit—in all these different environments, we are surrounded by potential new configurations, new ways of breaking out of our standard routines […] Recall the question we began with: What kind of environment creates good ideas? The simplest way to answer it is this: innovative environments are better at helping their inhabitants explore the adjacent possible, because they expose a wide and diverse sample of spare parts—mechanical or conceptual—and they encourage novel ways of recombining those parts. Environments that block or limit those new combinations—by punishing experimentation, by obscuring certain branches of possibility, by making the current state so satisfying that no one bothers to explore the edges—will, on average, generate and circulate fewer innovations than environments that encourage exploration. […] The trick is to figure out ways to explore the edges of possibility that surround you. This can be as simple as changing the physical environment you work in, or cultivating a specific kind of social network, or maintaining certain habits in the way you seek out and store information.
I am compelled by the concept of the adjacent possible, because it is such a constructivist element. Man’s environment defines his creative potential. He has a choice to change his environment on an individual, systemic, organizational and even societal level. One can leave abusive families, mobbing companies and fascist societies. Each one of us can move towards a more nutrient and creative environment or stay in our private hells; as Johnson puts it:
All of us live inside our own private versions of the adjacent possible.
Johnson concludes his chapter on the adjacent possible as such: Challenging problems don’t usually define their adjacent possible in such a clear, tangible way. Part of coming up with a good idea is discovering what those spare parts are, and ensuring that you’re not just recycling the same old ingredients. This, then, is where the next six patterns of innovation will take us, because they all involve, in one way or another, tactics for assembling a more eclectic collection of building block ideas, spare parts that can be reassembled into useful new configurations. The trick to having good ideas is not to sit around in glorious isolation and try to think big thoughts. The trick is to get more parts on the table.
Liquid Networks
Johnson argues that coffee houses in Paris, Boston, Vienna and Philadelphia were spaces where people from all walks of life met and where spillover happened. I ask myself if China has such spaces. Certainly, modern coffee houses don’t promote the idea of meeting people with different backgrounds, quite on the contrary modern coffee drinkers seem to be quite often a lonesome race, tugged away behind a book or screen, not interacting at all. But in a society where traditionally community is preferred over individuality it is quite astounding that Starbucks has declared China its second home market and many other entrepreneurs still see a promising business opportunity. It must be the substance not the space that makes Chinese go to coffee houses.
A Cultural Tendency for Clustering
If China is a society, which now picks up established nutritional habits of the affluent West, but coffee houses have lost their spillover quality of the golden fin de siècle, where are China’s creative spaces? I have a hunch (to use one of Johnson’s key words) since a few years that China’s liquid networks are home to clusters, which seem to develop here more naturally than in other parts of the known-to-me world. Ever since I attended a biopharmaceutical conference in Shanghai’s Zhangjiang High Tech Park in 2009, I was impressed if not irritated by the density and intimacy of global and national competitors within one such business park. Johnson might argue that such clusters are only one phenomenon of superlinear cities which host exponentially more creatives than small towns, but where else in this world have general managers and heads of RnD of GlaxoSmithKline, Baxter, Novartis, Bayer, Takeda, etc. monthly round tables to exchange their experiences? And this surely in every industry you can think of. I guess both on a private level as expats as well as on a professional level as decision makers and researchers. And where else in the world exists a similarly high fluctuation of well-trained employees? Chinese executives and PhDs, who are in the second or third row of the corporate hierarchy, profit from such thriving interaction and from the opportunity to have similar promising employers within a walk’s reach. More and more move up to be the top dogs or set up their own enterprise and benefit from newly available financial tools. Spillover wherever you look, and for some law geeks an euphemism for intellectual property theft. But people are and will always be the major leak when it comes to unwanted know how transfer.
Shanghai’s Zhangjiang High Tech Park is only one example of a Chinese cluster with the typical characteristics of risk taking entrepreneurship, spillover, networking, etc. which we all know from the Silicon Valley example. Beijing’s Zhongguan Village with its 18000 plus software companies would be another of these national level, government supported clusters that have already gained considerable fame abroad. What is rarely discussed though, is the fact, that clustering is a natural phenomenon in China, quite contrary to the West. You name an industry or a product and you would find that 80% of the companies manufacturing or trading with that product would be located in one town or even one district of a town. Stationary to be found in Zhejiang’s Yiwu, for x-ray equipment go to Guangdong’s Dongguan, Shanghai’s Beijing Road is the place where the end user finds DIY tools, shop after shop offering the same or similar stock. Chinese entrepreneurs seem to have a tendency to flock together within geographical vicinity. I attribute this phenomenon to the basic Chinese concept of community and China’s population density per se.
Shanghai’s Fengxian district is home to a huge industrial area which is neither central nor city government supported. Still it has probably the globally highest density of workshops with laser cutting and laser welding equipment. A German industry expert told me that he was amazed how fast this high-end technology spreads in that area, where every small workshop operates with dangerous equipment without much protection, where broken parts are quickly fixed, sometimes ingeniously, often resulting in poor quality products. Like in all other such industry clusters whether for DIY supply or B2B requests the customer profits from fast response times, 24-7 availability and competitive pricing and has to leverage these benefits by probably lowering his product requirements.
Liquid Networks and Specialization
Clusters foster specialization. Not necessarily, but definitely when competition increases and prices drop. Then, companies have to think about carving out a new profitable turf. Businesses located at the other end of the world will never be able to react as fast as businesses within a cluster; continuous fast reaction can decide over survival or liquidation. I have heard quite often that Chinese companies do a great job when they copy or adapt a foreign technology, because they manage to increase the production efficiency. Maximum output at minimum input. And I am convinced that this proven track record for highly efficient production and management processes is a result of clustering and specialization, two economic phenomena, which are caused by a high population density. In other words: China is innovative because there are many Chinese.
Johnson says: Kleiber’s law proved that as life gets bigger, it slows down. But West’s model demonstrated one crucial way in which human-built cities broke from the patterns of biological life: as cities get bigger, they generate ideas at a faster clip. This is what we call “superlinear scaling”: if creativity scaled with size in a straight, linear fashion, you would of course find more patents and inventions in a larger city, but the number of patents and inventions per capita would be stable. West’s power laws suggested something far more provocative: that despite all the noise and crowding and distraction, the average resident of a metropolis with a population of five million people was almost three times more creative than the average resident of a town of a hundred thousand.
In 2010 I did some research for a paper about industrial automation in China. What I found was a country that was at the verge of transforming itself from the largest manual workbench into the largest automated production line. In 2013 China did take over the US and is since then officially the country with the highest annual sales volume of industrial robots. Still the ratio population vs. robot is low compared to the old, industrialized nations, but the trend is clear. In the course of my current responsibilities I happen to cooperate with many integrators | 集成商, i.e. companies that integrate industrial picking, painting or welding robots for their end customers. It is estimated by industry experts that there are about 4000 integrators in China, about half of them located in the YRD and again about half of those in Wuxi, a million people city between Shanghai and Nanjing.
So much for clustering, but what about specialization? Industry colleagues debate quite a lot what impact such a density of integrators will have on the global market. One thing is already visible: a reverse trend of integrated product flow. Chinese integrators have picked up existing foreign technologies and have started to export their services and products, e.g. Dalian Auto integrates automotive production lines for its clients globally and operates subsidiaries in Germany, Japan and the US to access the OEM headquarters of its clients. The more interesting question though is what we can expect from that volume of integrators in regard to innovation? Integrators sit at the very crossroad of incremental innovation and amusingly or rather not integrated innovation| 集成创新 is one of the three form of recommended innovation which are outlined in the Medium and Long–term National Plan for Science and Technology Development 2006–2020 (short MLP). Due to this high number of competitors, fast specialization is predictable. Chinese entrepreneurs have a proven track record in efficiency maximizing incremental innovation and fast commercialization. This army of integrators will soon be an additional back bone of a giant nation state going international.
Exaptation: Seaturtle not Seaweed
It’s common to ask Chinese expats who return to China whether they are haigui or haidai, cherished seaturtle or despised seaweed. But who is to judge? Whenever somebody returns to one’s home turf after a long stay abroad, he will bring back impressions and experiences from another world and many new perspectives of looking at things whether this is politics, values, business models or the application of technologies. People always carry know how in their minds, people are at the center of the spillover phenomenon. It were the adventurers, pioneers, risk taking entrepreneurs who left Europe for the US before WWI and the great minds that had to leave before and during WWII who built a society that is still being envied by others for its many accomplishments. It might as well be that we will look back at Chinese sea turtles as the people who crafted modern China. The stories abound with Chinese exapting (another of Johnson’s key words) Western technologies or business practices and implementing them successfully in their home country. Two famous examples are Ma Yun, who never lived abroad, but built his taobao empire on a Western business model (and outperforms ebay meanwhile in turnover volume) and Wang Gang, who never built a company, but turned Chinese minister of technology after a 10 year stint in Audi’s German HQ. Whatever industry, there will be a few haigui who have succeeded or are under way to revolutionize China.
The creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect but by the play instinct acting from inner necessity. The creative mind plays with the objects it loves.
[Carl G. Jung]
Inspiration may be a form of super-consciousness, or perhaps of sub-consciousness – I wouldn’t know. But I am sure it is the anti-thesis of self-consciousness.
[Aaron Copland]
[Carl G. Jung]
Inspiration may be a form of super-consciousness, or perhaps of sub-consciousness – I wouldn’t know. But I am sure it is the anti-thesis of self-consciousness.
[Aaron Copland]
