I started reading this book because of this recommendation.

Steven tells story of different innovative ideas and in each one explains a pattern. I think the authors goal here is to show that there are patterns in innovation and we can use them to be more innovative. The other way to look at it is that these patterns are not “how to be innovative” but “how innovative ideas look like.”

Steven tells that good ideas have the following patterns:

• Adjacent possible: they one step away from the current state of knowledge or technology.
• Slow Hunches: Ideas start as a guess, and people’s guesses will collide and uncover a new fact. This means that ideas must be shared otherwise these hunches would die.
• Serendipity: Come from unexpected places.
• Error: Sometimes being wrong shows something that no one has seen before. The DNA example is used here that mutations sometimes make mistakes.
• Expatiation: we can borrow ideas from other contexts and solve a problem somewhere else.
• Platforms: Some ideas like the internet and GPS are platforms they allow other ideas to build upon them.

None of these patterns were unexpected to me. I enjoyed the story behind the innovations and how he explained each concept. At some chapters I felt bored because the subject was obvious like the platform pattern and the book keeps explaining.

In the final chapter Steven makes a comparison of ideas based on these two subjects:

• Made to make money/ Made to share publicly
• Made in solitary / Made in a group

By categorizing the ideas he finds out that ideas belonging to category of thing that were created not for money and created by a group are far more than other 3 categories.

This is not surprising. But good that you can see it in numbers. I’ve studied math and reading through any subject you different mathematicians complete each others work in a subject by discovering new theorems. Mathematicians shared their theorems publicly. This helped people from around the world to contribute to the discoveries.