Where do you YOUR new ideas come from? Mine are often borne of sleep deprivation or excessive chocolate.

Steven Johnson is someone who makes sense of where we get new ideas. He’s a science writer with a collection of titles that include Interface Culture and Everything Bad is Good for You.  (That’s where I found out why it was really important to watch American Idol.)  It looks like Johnson is hitting it out of the park again with new title, Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation. His new book is due to be published October 5, but right now there’s a new video on the net that’s going viral.  It’s a cartoon that summarizes Johnson’s idea and made me put in a pre-order for the book.

I’m not the only one who thinks Stephen Johnson is worth paying attention to.  On Saturday, September 25, The Wall Street Journal published an article by Johnson.  Here’s a snippet from the story:

The premise that innovation prospers when ideas can serendipitously connect and recombine with other ideas may seem logical enough, but the strange fact is that a great deal of the past two centuries of legal and folk wisdom about innovation has pursued the exact opposite argument, building walls between ideas. Ironically, those walls have been erected with the explicit aim of encouraging innovation. They go by many names: intellectual property, trade secrets, proprietary technology, top-secret R&D labs. But they share a founding assumption: that in the long run, innovation will increase if you put restrictions on the spread of new ideas, because those restrictions will allow the creators to collect large financial rewards from their inventions. And those rewards will then attract other innovators to follow in their path. [more]

Take a look for yourself and let me know what you think.

These are the winners in the 11 categories:

1. Entrepreneurship and small business. Escape from Cubicle Nation: From Corporate Prisoner to Thriving Entrepreneur by Pamela Slim.
2. Leadership. Maestro: A Surprising Story About Leading by Listening.
3. Management. The Four Conversations: Daily Communication That Gets Results by Jeffery Ford & Laurie Ford.
4. Marketing and advertising. Trust Agents: Using the Web to Build Influence, Improve Reputation, and Earn Trust by by Chris Brogan & Julien Smith.
5. Sales. A Seat at the Table: How Top Salespeople Connect and Drive Decisions at the Executive Level by Marc Miller.
6. Finance and economics. False Economy: A Surprising Economic History of the World by Alan Beattie.
7. Biographies and narratives. The Match King: Ivar Kreuger, the Financial Genius Behind a Century of Wall Street Scandals by Frank Partnoy.
8. Current interest. Too Big to Fail: The Inside Story of How Wall Street and Washington Fought to Save the Financial System—and Themselves by Andrew Ross Sorkin.
9. Personal development. Power of 2: How to Make the Most of Your Partnerships at Work and in Life by Rodd Wagner & Gale Muller, Ph.D.
10. Innovation and creativity. The Design of Business: Why Design Thinking Is the Next Competitive Advantage by Roger L. Martin.
11. Big ideas. What Would Google Do? by Jeff Jarvis.