Smart World: Breakthrough Creativity And the New Science of Ideas (Hardcover)

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Editorial Reviews

Review

"A provocative look at the creative process..." --BusinessWeek, July 9, 2007

Product Description

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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Product Details

• Hardcover: 303 pages
• Publisher: Harvard Business School Press; 1 edition (June 5, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1591394171
• ISBN-13: 978-1591394174
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.3 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (14 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #221,906 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

20 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars How to Achieve Creative Breakthroughs in a "Smart World" , May 26, 2007

By	Robert Morris (Dallas, Texas) - See all my reviews (TOP 50 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

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.

14 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Interesting but confused, July 13, 2007

By	Mr. Ian D. Gray "idgray" (Fennell Bay, NSW Australia) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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.

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars "Class pay attention--you'll learn something.", June 14, 2007

By	George Lazar (Los Angeles, CA) - See all my reviews

In "Smart World" Richard Ogle sets out to probe, demystify and explain how creative minds work when major discoveries bubble up -- often in wildly unexpected places and by unknown entrepreneurs, artists and scientists.

His tale blends history, science, sociology, linguistics and physics to tell of some major breakthroughs, including Gutenberg's printing press, Picasso's discovery of Cubism, how Watson & Crick uncovered DNA -- the twisting molecular structure that carries life's genetic blueprint, the personal computer explosion, architect Frank Gehry's dazzling Bilbao museum, and even the magical allure of a child's doll, Barbie.

Along the way Ogle introduces what he calls "idea-spaces," "hotpockets," and "small-world networks" to show how tectonic shifts in knowledge take hold.

Among his observations: some inventors succeed not by inventing from scratch, but by using bits of established ideas and then pushing that knowledge into a new direction that leads to a giant discovery. This method worked for Watson & Crick and for Gutenberg as well. Equally sharp is Ogle's explanation of how some potentially great ideas die -- Xerox's research team had a crackerjack PC design -- but a tiny rival, Apple, thanks to its founders Jobs and Wozniak, was better plugged into the critical hobbyist world, which in turn triggered the PC goldmine.

Although Ogle's book, published by Harvard Business School Press, is obviously targeted for business readers desperate to find the next big product, his 263 pages (excluding footnotes, bibliography and index) are so rich in material that it's too good for just a narrow audience.

"Smart World" is a smart book. Read it.