To paraphrase Dorothy Parker, books on creativity and innovation are not to be tossed aside lightly. They should be thrown with great force. Most books on creativity and innovation are awful. With rare exceptions, such books repeat simple ideas endlessly, and/or stretch one good idea out from five pages to 550 pages. It is dreadful stuff.
But that said, a new-ish book on the subject keeps getting positive reviews, so I sense myself getting suckered in. The book is “The Medici Effect”, by Frans Johansson. This weekend’s Washington Post has the following to say about it:
Over the years, there has been a steady stream of books that purport to explain how creative thinking happens and how to foster it. But in a readable 190 pages, Frans Johansson does better than most in capturing the mystery and magic of this process.
Granted, that is sort of damning with faint praise, but that is better than the usual fare in this area, which is lucky to be praised with faint damns. Here is Johansson in an interview with the ACM giving an example to describe what he is talking about:
So there is this telecommunications engineer that has been is trying to figure out how to efficiently route telecom messages through a haphazard routing system. And one day the communications engineer met an ecologist, who studies social insects, like wasps and ants. And they started talking, and the ecologist described how ants search for food.
As it turned out, the ant’s search strategy turned out to be very applicable to the routing of telecom message packets. Once the engineer realized this, he decided to explore this particular intersection between ant ecology and computer search algorithms, so he spent three years looking at the connection between the way social insects behave and the way you can use computers to optimize particular types of search algorithms.
And that has now lead to an entirely new field called swarm intelligence, which essentially came out of the intersection of the study of social insects and computer search algorithms. This methodology has been used in everything from helping truck drivers find their way around the Swiss Alps to helping unmanned aerial vehicles search for terrorists in Afghanistan.
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