The more people you put together, the more ideas you get. If you remember from the last post, the relationship between population and creativity (measured by patents per capita) is a power law relationship. There are probably flaws with that conclusion, but you don’t have to fully buy it to appreciate the insight.
Johnson says, “The city and the Web have been such engines of innovation because, for complicated historical reasons, they are both environments that are powerfully suited for the creation, diffusion, and adoption of good ideas.”
That sentence is a major element of this book. If you were reading this book (which I would highly recommend), you would highlight the living shit out of that sentence.
Three operative words: Create. Diffuse. Adopt. These words are all addressed in this book. Why do some environments tend to create a lot of ideas? Why do some environments allow ideas to diffuse easily? Why do some environments tend to promote the adoption of new ideas?
By the end of this book, you’ll know the answers.