Smart World: Breakthrough Creativity and the New Science of Ideas

What do jazz musician Dave Brubeck, Apple's Steve Jobs, Barbie creator Ruth Handler, and architect Frank Geary all have in common? Not just that they are credited with some of the most inventive products and innovations of the last century — the classic jazz album Time Out, the iPod, Spain's spectacular Guggenheim Museum — but their stories are unique in the way these creative leaps came about. Each used imaginative intelligence for certain, yet were able to combine this intelligence with networks outside of their own minds to reach true creative breakthroughs. This type of creativity gives credence to the idea that not all brilliant breakthroughs come from the minds of individual geniuses. On the contrary, our world is made up of intelligent networked spaces that, if navigated correctly, can lead us to breakthrough ideas.

The most creative people, it turns out, are those who let the system think for them. In Smart World, Richard Ogle argues that breakthroughs occur when we access new — idea-spaces — and exploit the laws that govern their interaction. Ogle says a new science of ideas — based on the cognitive psychology of the smart world paradigm and the laws drawn from networked science — is now possible.

Though still in its infancy, this science is already radically transforming our understanding of what human creativity is and how it originates. We now live in a “smart” world made up of a series of these social and cultural idea-spaces, and the intelligence embedded in these spaces plays a major role in guiding our thoughts and actions .These spaces are govern by nine laws, illuminated in individual chapters with fascinating stories of dramatic breakthroughs in science, business, and art. Smart World paints an intriguing vision in which we will develop an economics of ideas underlying the idea-economy, witness an exponential increase in the pace of innovation, and better anticipate where the next waves of innovation may come from.