knows one big thing". Steven Johnson knows many big things. Steven Johnson is not only

the author of books like "Everything Bad is Good for You," "Interface Culture" and "Mind

Wide Open." But he's also an entrepreneur and founder of early online communities. He

founded "Outside.in", a provider of hyper-local news and information as well as two influential

websites; the pioneering web feed, "Seed," and the community news discussion site, plastic.com.

"Emergence" is not only a title of one of his books, but is also a theme throughout

his works. "The Ghost Map" illustrates the emergence of public health; "The Invention

of Air", the emergence of science, and his latest book, "Where Good Ideas Come From:

The Natural History of Innovation", looks at the emergence of the new. Innovation is,

of course, central to Google and in his latest book, Steven explores the space of innovation,

observing the environments and networks from which good ideas emerge from coral reefs to

Building 20 at MIT. He debunks the myth of the lone genius, suddenly struck by inspiration

and instead, dwells on all of the work that that genius has built on and connects to.

And most importantly for Googlers, Steven proposes six specific patterns that foster

innovation within environments. So, please join me in welcoming Steven Johnson to the

Authors@Google series.

[applause]

>>Steven: Thank you, Amy. It's great to be back at Google. As always, you all are wonderful

people I like to be around. I’m always inspired by the things that you do, so it's an honor

to be back to talk about this new book. So, I wanted to say I come here via Chicago, where

I was talking on Wednesday night, but before that, I was in D.C., talking to some people

in the government and did a very fun thing at the White House. But then on Tuesday, I

was talking about this book and these ideas in the intelligence community, because they

were doing a series on being more innovative and creative inside of bureaucracy. So, they

invited me to come in and give this talk and they called me up and they said, "Listen,

here's the deal. We have to send a special car to pick you up because the building where

you're gonna speak does not show up on Google Maps anywhere, even in satellite view. You

won't see it at all. So, we have to take you to this special, secure, undisclosed location."

Which sounded really intimidating, but then when I got there, it turned out it was great

because there's very little Foursquare competition there, so I'm now the mayor of the location.

[laughter]

I think Cheney was the mayor before, but I can't come out.

[laughter]

Anyway, so it's nice to be in a slightly more open, architecture environment. So, I wanna

talk about this new book, and talk about a little bit about the arguments and then talk

a bit about some of the things that I think are happening, particularly with books and

e-books, and some of the things that you guys are on the cutting edge right now. So, I'm

gonna do a little bit of the book talk and a little bit of something custom-tailored

for this particular venue. One of these I would start by doing is telling you a little

bit about how I got to this project. It actually dates back to book that Amy alluded to, which

is a book called "The Ghost Map", which I was here talking about four years ago. "The

Ghost Map" is a story about a cholera epidemic in London, in the 1850s. And I got interested

in the story because it was one of those things that I kept colliding with from different

angles. So, I'd be reading something about the history of science and I would stumble

across this story. And then I'd be reading something about interface design, or cartography,

because there's a map at the center and I would stumble across this story, or I would

read about something and the history of public health and I would stumble across this story.

And anytime there's some interesting nugget of historical data or some perspective of

person that you keep colliding with from different angles, it's always a sign that something

interesting is going on. And so, I decided to dig in a little bit more and the story

is I heard it; went something like this: It's 1854 in London. The city, like many cities

in Europe and in the United States, is being regularly attacked by this terrible disease

of cholera. Every five years or so, a big epidemic will roll through the city. Five

thousand people will die over the course of a summer. Nobody really understands it, but

the reigning orthodox theory about cholera is that it's in the air. It's the miasma theory

with the dominant model for understanding it, which was somewhat understandable because

London was probably the smelliest city in all of the world at that particular point.

So people naturally assume that this noxious air that they were breathing had to be the

culprit here. But, in fact, we now know that cholera was in the water. It was not at all

a problem of poisonous vapors; it was because the water supply was contaminated by this

bacterium. So, this outbreak rips through the neighborhood of Soho in London in late

August, early September of 1854. It kills ten percent of the population in the space

of about ten days. And in the middle of all this, this lone genius, this brilliant man,

a local doctor named John Snow goes right into the belly of the beast of the outbreak

and starts knocking on doors, investigating what's going on with this outbreak and calculating

who has died at what address. And he built this map, and the map shows the number of

deaths at each address in the neighborhood with this little, black bars. And when you

look at the map, you can see very clearly that there's this very strong pronounced cluster

of deaths right around a popular pump at the center of Soho at 40 Broad Street. And you

can see the further you get from the pump, the deaths fade away. And so he looks at this

map and he says, "Aha! The problem is with the water. It's not in the air. Cholera is

a water-borne disease, so if we can clear the water up whatever this is causing this;

we'll rid the city of this terrible menace." So, he goes to the authorities, convinces

them of his theory. They remove the pump handle, the epidemic stops, they start building things

like the London sewers to clean up the water supply and by 1866, the cholera is gone from

London forever. So I thought, "That's a great story. It'll be like a Victorian episode of

CSI. It's got a page-turner kind of feel, but it's a triumph of science and all this

kind of stuff." So, I started to really research it in earnest for this book, and what I found

was, quite quickly, was that almost every important fact in that story that I just told

you was wrong. And the first part of it was that Snow had the theory of cholera as a water-borne

disease for six years before the outbreak came to Soho. He was convinced in late 1848

that, in fact, everybody was wrong about this disease and, in fact, it was a water-borne

problem, not an air-borne problem. And he wrote a number of essays, wrote a number of

letters to "The Lancet", he actually created a couple of other maps and basically, his

whole theory was roundly ignored by the authorities for a very long time. When the outbreak finally

came to Soho, the map he made was actually not triggering a eureka moment--a sudden moment

of clarity in his head--it was, in fact, more of a marketing vehicle for an idea that he'd

had for a long time that he'd been working on for a long period of time. And it turned

out, also, that Snow's interest in all this was actually just a hobby that he had on the

side. Most of us don't have cholera as a hobby, but Snow was that kind of guy,

He was trained as a physician and an anesthesiologist, but he was interested in a million different

things, and cholera was one of those things. In fact, it turns out to be a trait of a lot

of people that I look at in this new book that unusually innovative people have a lot

of hobbies. This is a very interesting characteristic. So, it turned out to be precisely because

he did have a number of different hobbies and interests that it was the interaction

between all these different passions that allowed him to see around a lot of the orthodoxies

of the day and solve this riddle in a way that other medical authorities couldn't. But

the most important thing that I found in researching this book was that Snow had a collaborator

that no one had talked about. It was almost entirely written out of the historical accounts

of this outbreak. And this collaborator was this guy named Henry Whitehead, who was a

local vicar; not at all a man of science. He was one of these local vicars, he was a

classic connector figure who knew everyone in the neighborhood, he had a great social

intelligence and he got involved in the case, initially actually, to try to prove Snow wrong,

which was kind of funny, and then became an ally of Snow's. And it was Whitehead who did

a lot of the shoe-leather detective work; particularly in tracking down people who had

left the neighborhood because he had these thick ties to them socially. And it was Whitehead

who ended up tracking down the patient zero of the whole outbreak, which turned out to

be crucial in addition to the map in convincing the authorities that Snow's theory was right.

So, what had been this kind of classic story of the lone genius having a eureka moment

of sudden clarity, turned out to be a much slower, much more complex, and much more collaborative

and networked process than the story had originally been told to me, and I thought much more interesting.

And so, I realized as I was writing that book that there was, in a sense, a latent theory

of innovation of breakthrough ideas in the environments that make them possible that

was lurking in the background of this story I was telling you about cholera. So, I decided

to make that story, that theory, front and center in a new book. And so, I went to my

publisher and persuaded them that I should write a book about innovation and the spaces

that encourage innovation. And early on, I decided that I would look not only at human

societies and cultural environments, but also biological ones and that there would probably

be an interesting set of analogies to draw between human innovation and biological innovation.

And so, I knew that I wanted to look at environments like rainforests and coral reefs that have

a long track record of generating biological diversity, because I figured there would be

patterns that you would see in both of them. The problem was then, when I actually sat

down to decide what would go into the book, I realized that I had set the scope of this

project ridiculously wide because it could include potentially, any good idea that any

human being had ever had in the course of human history, or any interesting life form

that ever evolved in the course of life on Earth, which, when you're sitting--

[laughter]

with Google search box open on your desktop and a cup of coffee in the morning, is daunting

when you can include everything like that. So, I had to figure out and for a while I

panicked and thought that I had made a terrible mistake. But, eventually what I realized is

that I was seeing these recurring patterns that were showing up again and again in the

environments that I was looking at. And I decided that each chapter, basically, should

be devoted to one of these patterns and eventually came up with seven of them really. There's

an introductory one that you can count as one or not. And once I had that, it got a

lot easier to write because the patterns, in a sense, became these magnets that would

attract all these different stories to the right slot and then it became really fun.

And it was almost a question of "where do I stop?" cause there was so much to say. And

I wanted to talk a little bit about a few of them and tell you a little bit of my theory

about them. The first is one that we've already seen in the case of Snow. It's what I call

"the Snow hunch." There seems to be this almost innate desire to tell stories about innovation

in terms of eureka moments. For some reason, we just want to condense them down to these

moments of sudden clarity where a light bulb pops over someone's head and they suddenly

see the world differently. The apple falls from the tree and they have a theory of gravity;

whatever the trigger is. But when you actually go back and look at it, it turns out that

the historical record is an historical record of innovation. Eureka moments are the exception

and not the rule. Almost always, there is a very long incubation period that goes into

a breakthrough idea where people start with this inkling, this sense, that there's something

interesting in a particular problem; a feeling that the authorities are missing something

or there's an opening, but they can't quite put their finger on it. And for whatever reason,

they have patience or they have a work environment, or they're just stubborn or they have good

tools that help them remember these things and they are able to keep these hunches alive

for long periods of time. This is a great example of this. I show this slide a lot.

This room will probably guess what this is cause you can see in the upper left hand corner,

it says "CERN." It says, "This machine is a server. Do not power down." Right? So, this

is the first World Wide Web server that Tim Berners-Lee put together. This is back in

the day when the World Wide Web was on one server, where you could trip over the power

cord and be like, "Oh, I'm so sorry. The World Wide Web is down."

[laughter]

Which we've moved beyond that. But, it's a famous story, but Berners-Lee, this is a classic

instance of a slow hunch, right? He starts working at CERN in 1982, almost as a consultant

and he's overloaded with all the information and projects and people who are there and

so he starts working on this project he calls ENQUIRE for a while. And then he puts that

aside and a few years later, he starts working on something called Tango, which doesn't really

take off and then it's only three or four years later after that, that he starts working

on something that he ends up calling the Web. And, of course, he's basing it on existing

platforms that are out there; he's basing it on the Internet, of course, and parts of

SGML and things like that. And it's only eight years after this hunch starts to be cultivated

in his mind that he finally goes to his bosses and says, "I think I may have invented a new