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This is the Steven Johnson book we have all been waiting for—the book in which Steven brings together the ideas behind his last few books with his burgeoning career as a media guru (and entrepreneur) to address an urgent and universal question: Where does the flash of brilliance come from? How do we generate the great ideas that push our careers, our lives, our society, our culture forward? What do we need to know, and what kind of environment do we need to foster, to come up with these ideas ourselves? These are questions we want answered, and not only does Steven have answers we want to hear, but he presents them in the dazzling and infectious style we have come to expect from him, using his fluency in fields from neurobiology to urban studies to the future of the Internet to provide the complete, exciting, and encouraging story of where great ideas come from. Johnson’s story begins with Charles Darwin’s first encounter with a coral reef in a conspicuously clear blue sea. It would become known as Darwin’s Paradox: How does this diverse ecosystem thrive in such an inauspicious (nutrient-sparse) location—in apparent violation of natural laws? Next, Steven introduces us to another natural law, Klieber’s Law, one of those beautiful equations that links all life on earth, from bacteria to hippopotami to human cities: as organisms grow in size, their metabolism slows by a specific and predictable amount. But recently scientists at the Santa Fe Institute discovered one anomaly: in modern super-cities, as they grow, they produce ideas more quickly. Finally, Steven presents one last immutable law, the 10/10 rule of communication technology: it takes ten years to build a new platform, and ten years for it to find a mass audience—it applies across the board, from AM radio to the VCR to HDTV. Here, the notable exception is the Web, which has taken the 10/10 rule and made it 1/1. Clearly, there is something fundamentally different going on in these three examples, something that courses through natural history up through metropolises and the Internet, something that fosters innovation, something that triggers the creative sparks that lead to great ideas. What is it? In Where Good Ideas Come From, Steven identifies the seven key principles to the genesis of great ideas. He traces them across time and disciplines, from FBI agents tracking terrorists to scientists figuring out nature’s riddles to Gutenberg borrowing a wine-press to print the first books to Larry and Sergey founding Google on a hunch and a formula. Steven proves that the relevant question is not, How did those guys get so clever? What we need to ask is this: What kind of environment fosters the development of these kinds of ideas? The answers can be surprising—it’s time to give up on the scholar’s isolated ivory tower—but are never less than revelatory, convincing, and inspiring.