Since ancient times, people have believed that breakthrough ideas come from the brains of geniuses with awesome rational powers. In recent years, however, the paradigm has begun to shift toward the notion that the source of creativity lies "out there," in the network of connections between people and ideas. In this provocative book, Richard Ogle crystallizes the nature of this shift, and boldly outlines "a new science of ideas." The key resides in what he calls "idea-spaces," a set of nodes in a network of people (and their ideas) that cohere and take on a distinctive set of characteristics leading to the generation of breakthrough ideas. These spaces are governed by nine laws - illuminated in individual chapters with fascinating stories of dramatic breakthroughs in science, business, and art. "Smart World" will change forever the way we think about creativity and innovation.
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"A provocative look at the creative process..." --BusinessWeek, July 9, 2007
About the Author
Richard Ogle is an entrepreneur, consultant, and independant scholar.
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57 of 61 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
Although we recognize and appreciate the importance of the human mind's capability for breakthrough creativity (e.g. DNA, printing with movable type, the personal computer), Richard Ogle acknowledges, "the mental processes that led to them have remained largely beyond our grasp. Where do truly innovative ideas come from, and how does the mind make the leap to embrace them? What role do existing cultural and social factors play? Above all, what are the primary mental faculties involved in creativity, and how do they work?" These are among the questions to which Ogle responds in this volume. His objective is to provide "a theoretical and practical account of achievements that before were generally regarded as the unfathomable products of genius." He succeeds brilliantly by forging "a deep connection between the discoveries concerning discontinuity made in the emerging science of networks, the imaginative processes underlying creative leaps, and the law-governed dynamics of a networked model of idea--spaces in the extended mind."
Ogle has identified nine laws of network science, any one or combination thereof that can explain creative breakthroughs. For example, "The Law of Tipping Points": Under certain critical conditions, order arises out of disorder. Malcolm Gladwell devotes an entire book, The Tipping Point, to examining how relatively insignificant factors can have profound impact. In scientific terms, this is the concept of "phased transitions" or, as Thomas Kuhn describes them in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, "paradigm shifts." Ogle offers several examples that illustrate how tipping points within the process of phased transitions "violate what scientists used to think of as a fundamental principle of physical systems: that there is a direct, quantifiable relationship between cause and effect."
After I read this passage in Ogle's book (pages 79-95), I set the book down, located my copy of Jacob Bronowski's The Origins of Knowledge and Imagination and reviewed the passages I had highlighted. Although there are no references to Bronowski in Ogle's book, I think this brief excerpt from it helps us to increase our understanding of how we see and make sense of the world is "deeply shaped by the framing that, consciously or not, we unavoidably bring to bear." Bronowski asserts that "even the perception of the senses is governed by mechanisms which make our knowledge of the outside world highly inferential. We do not receive impressions that are elemental. Our sense impressions are themselves constructed by the nervous system in such a way that they automatically carry with them an interpretation of what they see or hear or feel."
Recall Ogle's observation noted previous that "the mental processes that led to [various creative breakthroughs] have remained largely beyond our grasp." However, there have been some recent developments ("profoundly important advances") that have increased our understanding of those processes. One is the emerging science of networks. It suggests that pattern formation is not random. "Its newly discovered laws have led to two highly significant insights regarding creativity. First, the networks of the extended mind, like all dynamic networks, are self-organizing; they drive their own transformation, thereby enabling the intelligence embedded in the idea-spaces of our smart world to provide a vast and potent external source of creative energy and ideas. Second, the, the human mind's imaginative faculties not only actively piggyback on these dynamics, deriving much of their creative power from them, but turn out to be themselves driven by universal network laws." In other words, the space of ideas "thinks" for each of us.
This is by no means an "easy read." Many will need to re-read it (as did I) to absorb and digest Ogle's rigorous examination of what is indeed "the new science of ideas." He offers several specific strategies that enable his readers to conduct their own examination of that science. When concluding his book, he offers this encouragement: "trust your imaginative faculties as they surf embedded webs of intelligence near and far, and have the confidence that if you're up for the ride, the space of ideas, shaped by the laws of network dynamics, will do most of the hard thinking for you."
Those who share my high regard for this book are urged to check out the aforementioned books by Kuhn and Bronowski as well as Albert-Laszlo Barabasi's Linked: How Everything Is Connected to Everything Else and What It Means, Andy Clark's Natural-Born Cyborgs: Minds, Technologies, and the Future of Human Intelligence, Albert Borgmann's Holding On to Reality: The Nature of Information at the Turn of the Millennium, Gerald M. Edelman's Bright Air, Brilliant Fire: On the Matter of the Mind and his more recently published Second Nature: Brain Science and Human Knowledge, and The Ten Faces of Innovation: IDEO's Strategies for Defeating the Devil's Advocate and Driving Creativity Throughout Your Organization co-authored by Thomas Kelley and Jonathan Littman.
Ogle has identified nine laws of network science, any one or combination thereof that can explain creative breakthroughs. For example, "The Law of Tipping Points": Under certain critical conditions, order arises out of disorder. Malcolm Gladwell devotes an entire book, The Tipping Point, to examining how relatively insignificant factors can have profound impact. In scientific terms, this is the concept of "phased transitions" or, as Thomas Kuhn describes them in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, "paradigm shifts." Ogle offers several examples that illustrate how tipping points within the process of phased transitions "violate what scientists used to think of as a fundamental principle of physical systems: that there is a direct, quantifiable relationship between cause and effect."
After I read this passage in Ogle's book (pages 79-95), I set the book down, located my copy of Jacob Bronowski's The Origins of Knowledge and Imagination and reviewed the passages I had highlighted. Although there are no references to Bronowski in Ogle's book, I think this brief excerpt from it helps us to increase our understanding of how we see and make sense of the world is "deeply shaped by the framing that, consciously or not, we unavoidably bring to bear." Bronowski asserts that "even the perception of the senses is governed by mechanisms which make our knowledge of the outside world highly inferential. We do not receive impressions that are elemental. Our sense impressions are themselves constructed by the nervous system in such a way that they automatically carry with them an interpretation of what they see or hear or feel."
Recall Ogle's observation noted previous that "the mental processes that led to [various creative breakthroughs] have remained largely beyond our grasp." However, there have been some recent developments ("profoundly important advances") that have increased our understanding of those processes. One is the emerging science of networks. It suggests that pattern formation is not random. "Its newly discovered laws have led to two highly significant insights regarding creativity. First, the networks of the extended mind, like all dynamic networks, are self-organizing; they drive their own transformation, thereby enabling the intelligence embedded in the idea-spaces of our smart world to provide a vast and potent external source of creative energy and ideas. Second, the, the human mind's imaginative faculties not only actively piggyback on these dynamics, deriving much of their creative power from them, but turn out to be themselves driven by universal network laws." In other words, the space of ideas "thinks" for each of us.
This is by no means an "easy read." Many will need to re-read it (as did I) to absorb and digest Ogle's rigorous examination of what is indeed "the new science of ideas." He offers several specific strategies that enable his readers to conduct their own examination of that science. When concluding his book, he offers this encouragement: "trust your imaginative faculties as they surf embedded webs of intelligence near and far, and have the confidence that if you're up for the ride, the space of ideas, shaped by the laws of network dynamics, will do most of the hard thinking for you."
Those who share my high regard for this book are urged to check out the aforementioned books by Kuhn and Bronowski as well as Albert-Laszlo Barabasi's Linked: How Everything Is Connected to Everything Else and What It Means, Andy Clark's Natural-Born Cyborgs: Minds, Technologies, and the Future of Human Intelligence, Albert Borgmann's Holding On to Reality: The Nature of Information at the Turn of the Millennium, Gerald M. Edelman's Bright Air, Brilliant Fire: On the Matter of the Mind and his more recently published Second Nature: Brain Science and Human Knowledge, and The Ten Faces of Innovation: IDEO's Strategies for Defeating the Devil's Advocate and Driving Creativity Throughout Your Organization co-authored by Thomas Kelley and Jonathan Littman.
54 of 61 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase
I found this book interesting in its descriptions of how innovations such as the PC, the printing press and Barbie(!) came about - it was fascinating to see how these things evolved and the confluence of ideas, influences and accidents which led to them.
However, I found the author's central thesis to be confused and (as a research mathematician myself in graph theory), I felt that he did not really understand the mathematics upon which he relies so heavily. He did not seem to understand that 'idea spaces' are not 'real', that they do not interact autonomously, but only through the mediation of a human mind. It is human minds that are exposed to unique sets of ideas and connect them together. While the ideas may be out there in human artefacts such as books, websites, machines, artworks etc, it takes a human mind to put them together. If you read his case studies without his theory, it becomes very clear that this is in fact the case. Lock a whole lot of books in a room and see how many ideas they come up with. Clearly none since books are simply a means of passively storing knowledge and it takes a human to 'activate' that knowledge. While network theory may deal with abstract relationships between nodes and their connections, when applied to the real world, these nodes are 'things': people, species, businesses, servers, power stations, cities, communities, chemicals whatever, not abstractions such as 'idea spaces'.
So overall, while I found the book interesting, I didn't find the thesis particulalry convincing and found that it obscured rather then elucidated the lessons to be learned from the author's examples.
However, I found the author's central thesis to be confused and (as a research mathematician myself in graph theory), I felt that he did not really understand the mathematics upon which he relies so heavily. He did not seem to understand that 'idea spaces' are not 'real', that they do not interact autonomously, but only through the mediation of a human mind. It is human minds that are exposed to unique sets of ideas and connect them together. While the ideas may be out there in human artefacts such as books, websites, machines, artworks etc, it takes a human mind to put them together. If you read his case studies without his theory, it becomes very clear that this is in fact the case. Lock a whole lot of books in a room and see how many ideas they come up with. Clearly none since books are simply a means of passively storing knowledge and it takes a human to 'activate' that knowledge. While network theory may deal with abstract relationships between nodes and their connections, when applied to the real world, these nodes are 'things': people, species, businesses, servers, power stations, cities, communities, chemicals whatever, not abstractions such as 'idea spaces'.
So overall, while I found the book interesting, I didn't find the thesis particulalry convincing and found that it obscured rather then elucidated the lessons to be learned from the author's examples.
7 of 7 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
This book was a bit of a challenge. First, I am not totally convinced that Ogle has discovered anything new but makes it appear to be so by inventing creative terminology. He borrows his ideas from the emerging field of network science and it is somewhat difficult to follow his explanations. What makes it particularly difficult is his introduction of his laws with their new-fangled terminology. Anyway, it seems to me that he could have made it easier for his readers had he come up with less convoluted jargon. A lot of authors today oversimplify language to make their books accessible to the largest market; this one errs in the opposite direction.
A lot of what he does say makes sense but is expressed differenty than in the past. For example, the notion that there is an "expanded" mind in the sense that the environment does the thinking for you. An example is the alphabet, which is set up so that you can easily choose any one of 26 letters and come up with a word. You don't have to start from scratch. Also the notion of idea-spaces; that is, fields or areas or conceptual schema that have imbedded in them certain ways of seeing or thinking about the world. There is, for example, the idea space of classical science, where science is practiced in a partucular way, or the idea space of modernist architecture, where architects abide by certain rules and applications. When different idea-spaces come together; e.g. when Frank Gerhy linked architecture with modern art, something new emerges. This happens, according to Ogle, when "weak ties" are connected. This is not new. Many creativity gurus speak about connecting completely different things together to come up with something new. I believe in the past others referred to ideas as coming from the "ether" or just being out there wainting to be discovered. So there has been some sense of these concepts; Ogle is putting more flesh on them.
The really fascinating portions of the book are when Ogle goes into the specific history of a breakthrough - the discovery of the structure of DNA or the invention of the printing press, for example - especially the personal, cultural and social histories involved .
I am also not sure that I agree with some of his criteria for what is a breakthrough. For example, he includes the classification of perimenopause, or premenopausal syndrome, as a breakthrough. How is this so? How is this different then from the discovery of "repressed memories" a decade or so ago, when all of a sudden lots of people seemed to have them and therapists galore popped up to coax them out?
Finally, any book that talks about the discovery of ideas and does not mention Edward de Bono has missed a big contributor to the field. A lot of what Ogle says has been summarized in much simpler fashion by de Bono. Ogle's creative arc is de Bono's lateral thinking, for example. De Bono also popularized the use of techniques to move away from linear thinking and into the type of thinking that Ogle advocates.
In sum, there is a lot of good and interesting stuff here but it presented in a difficult to follow way. Supplement this book with De Bono's books on lateral thinking.
A lot of what he does say makes sense but is expressed differenty than in the past. For example, the notion that there is an "expanded" mind in the sense that the environment does the thinking for you. An example is the alphabet, which is set up so that you can easily choose any one of 26 letters and come up with a word. You don't have to start from scratch. Also the notion of idea-spaces; that is, fields or areas or conceptual schema that have imbedded in them certain ways of seeing or thinking about the world. There is, for example, the idea space of classical science, where science is practiced in a partucular way, or the idea space of modernist architecture, where architects abide by certain rules and applications. When different idea-spaces come together; e.g. when Frank Gerhy linked architecture with modern art, something new emerges. This happens, according to Ogle, when "weak ties" are connected. This is not new. Many creativity gurus speak about connecting completely different things together to come up with something new. I believe in the past others referred to ideas as coming from the "ether" or just being out there wainting to be discovered. So there has been some sense of these concepts; Ogle is putting more flesh on them.
The really fascinating portions of the book are when Ogle goes into the specific history of a breakthrough - the discovery of the structure of DNA or the invention of the printing press, for example - especially the personal, cultural and social histories involved .
I am also not sure that I agree with some of his criteria for what is a breakthrough. For example, he includes the classification of perimenopause, or premenopausal syndrome, as a breakthrough. How is this so? How is this different then from the discovery of "repressed memories" a decade or so ago, when all of a sudden lots of people seemed to have them and therapists galore popped up to coax them out?
Finally, any book that talks about the discovery of ideas and does not mention Edward de Bono has missed a big contributor to the field. A lot of what Ogle says has been summarized in much simpler fashion by de Bono. Ogle's creative arc is de Bono's lateral thinking, for example. De Bono also popularized the use of techniques to move away from linear thinking and into the type of thinking that Ogle advocates.
In sum, there is a lot of good and interesting stuff here but it presented in a difficult to follow way. Supplement this book with De Bono's books on lateral thinking.
Most Recent Customer Reviews
2.0 out of 5 stars
interesting read, but not very useful
Have you ever wished you were more creative? I certainly have and not just because it would be awesome if I could draw. Read more
Published 3 months ago by K. Wilkins
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Very Broad and Deep View of Innovation
This is a very interesting book to read if you are interested in innovation from a wide variety of angles. Read more
Published 14 months ago by Jeff Bennett
5.0 out of 5 stars
Phenomenal!!!
Probably one of the most important books that most folks will never get around to reading.Don't make that mistake. I almost did. Read more
Published on April 25, 2010 by William Dahl
4.0 out of 5 stars
Good examples but somewhat esoteric
On the positive side the examples of major innovative concepts are very interesting and worth reading. Read more
Published on August 25, 2009 by J. Groen
4.0 out of 5 stars
Good book...a little long
The book is much longer than it needs to be. BUT it's got some good stuff. It does a nice job of sharing it's perspective on how good ideas are formed and the importance of the... Read more
Published on April 24, 2009 by Betsy N. Lopez
5.0 out of 5 stars
Applying the science of networks to creativity
This is a strange, wonderful and not always easy book. Richard Ogle tackles a slippery question about the mind: Where do truly creative leaps originate? Read more
Published on January 17, 2008 by Rolf Dobelli
5.0 out of 5 stars
A bit dry
Very "out of the box", not much of a page-turner, but it does spark some interest. The narratives are somewhat intruiging.
Published on November 30, 2007 by Cliff Gisemba
4.0 out of 5 stars
Cover Better Than the Book--Good Book but Dense
I have a lot of respect for Robert Morris' reviews, so read that one for a more positive spin on this book. Read more
Published on November 24, 2007 by Robert David STEELE Vivas
5.0 out of 5 stars
The way innovation really works...
How do breakthrough ideas, products, services come to live? What is the real contribution of the so called `geniuses' to the process? Read more
Published on August 30, 2007 by Paterni Riccardo
5.0 out of 5 stars
Networks of ideas
Do you think up innovative ideas all by yourself? Or does the world of ideas and theories think for you? Read more
Published on August 29, 2007 by Anne T. Zelenka
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