🧲 Books like this
Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation
Steven Johnson · back to the book
What’s in it
Tap a tag: ❤ = this matters to me · tap again ✕ = don’t care · again to reset. The list below updates each time.
24 books with the same feel
Hide books by the same authorHow We Got to Now: Six Innovations That Made the Modern World
Steven Johnson · 293 pages
"From the New York Times-bestselling author of Where Good Ideas Come From and Everything Bad Is Good for You, a new look at the power and legacy of great ideas. In this illustrated volume, Steven Johnson explores the history of innovation over centuries, tracing facets of modern life (refrigeration, clocks, and eyeglass lenses, to name a few) from their creation by hobbyists, amateurs, and entrepr
How to Fly a Horse: The Secret History of Creation, Invention, and Discovery
Kevin Ashton · 325 pages
"Inspiring and empowering, this journey behind the scenes of humanity's greatest creations reveals the surprising way we make something new. What do Thomas Jefferson's ice cream recipe, Coca Cola, and Chanel No. 5 have in common? They all depended on a nineteenth-century African boy who, with a single pinch, solved one of nature's great riddles and gave birth to the multimillion-dollar vanilla ind
The Soul of a New Machine
Tracy Kidder · 293 pages
"The Soul of a New Machine" is a non-fiction book written by Tracy Kidder and published in 1981. It chronicles the experiences of a computer engineering team racing to design a next-generation computer at a blistering pace under tremendous pressure. The machine was launched in 1980 as the Data General Eclipse MV/8000. The book won the 1982 National Book Award for Non-fiction and a Pulitzer Prize f
Tomorrowland: Our Staggering Journey from Science Fiction to Science Fact
Steven Kotler · 284 pages
The Evolution of Useful Things: How Everyday Artifacts-From Forks and Pins to Paper Clips and Zippers-Came to be as They are.
Henry Petroski · 288 pages
Engines of Creation: The Coming Era of Nanotechnology
K. Eric Drexler · 298 pages
Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time
Dava Sobel · 192 pages
The dramatic human story of an epic scientific quest and of one man's forty-year obsession to find a solution to the thorniest scientific dilemma of the day--"the longitude problem." Anyone alive in the eighteenth century would have known that "the longitude problem" was the thorniest scientific dilemma of the day-and had been for centuries. Lacking the ability to measure their longitude, sailo
The Lunar Men: Five Friends Whose Curiosity Changed the World
Jenny Uglow · 608 pages
Profiles of the Future: An Inquiry into the Limits of the Possible
Arthur C. Clarke · 256 pages
Makers: The New Industrial Revolution
Chris Anderson
The Metaverse: And How It Will Revolutionize Everything
Matthew L. Ball · 352 pages
Jony Ive: The Genius Behind Apple's Greatest Products
Leander Kahney · 321 pages
"The bestselling author of Inside Steve's Brain profiles Apple's legendary chief designer, Jonathan Ive. Jony Ive's designs have not only made Apple one of the most valuable companies in the world; they've overturned entire industries, from music and mobile phones to PCs and tablets. But for someone who has changed the world as much as he has, little is widely known about Apple's senior vice presi
Elon Musk: Inventing the Future
Ashlee Vance · 396 pages
In the spirit of Steve Jobs and Moneyball, Elon Musk is both an illuminating and authorized look at the extraordinary life of one of Silicon Valley's most exciting, unpredictable, and ambitious entrepreneurs -- a real-life Tony Stark -- and a fascinating exploration of the renewal of American invention and its new "makers." Elon Musk spotlights the technology and vision of Elon Musk, the renowned
The Day-Glo Brothers: The True Story of Bob and Joe Switzer's Bright Ideas and Brand-New Colors
Chris Barton
The story of Joe and Bob Switzer who experimented with ultraviolet lights and fluorescent paints and invented a new kind of color called Day-Glo.
The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger
Marc Levinson · 395 pages
In April 1956, a refitted oil tanker carried fifty-eight shipping containers from Newark to Houston. From that modest beginning, container shipping developed into a huge industry that made the boom in global trade possible. The Box tells the dramatic story of the container's creation, the decade of struggle before it was widely adopted, and the sweeping economic consequences of the sharp fall in t
The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution
Walter Isaacson · 560 pages
Following his blockbuster biography of Steve Jobs, The Innovators is Walter Isaacson’s revealing story of the people who created the computer and the Internet. It is destined to be the standard history of the digital revolution and an indispensable guide to how innovation really happens. What were the talents that allowed certain inventors and entrepreneurs to turn their visionary ideas into di
Age of Context: Mobile, Sensors, Data and the Future of Privacy
Robert Scoble, Shel Israel · 248 pages
The Innovator's Dilemma: The Revolutionary Book that Will Change the Way You Do Business
Clayton M. Christensen · 286 pages
Whiplash: How to Survive Our Faster Future
Joichi Ito, Jeff Howe · 327 pages
The Industries of the Future
Alec J. Ross · 304 pages
"Leading innovation expert Alec Ross explains what's next for the world, mapping out the advances and stumbling blocks that will emerge in the next ten years--for businesses, governments, and the global community--and how we can navigate them. While Alec Ross was working as Hillary Clinton's Senior Advisor on Innovation, he traveled to forty-one countries. He visited some of the toughest places in
Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future
Peter Thiel, Blake Masters · 224 pages
If you want to build a better future, you must believe in secrets. The great secret of our time is that there are still uncharted frontiers to explore and new inventions to create. In Zero to One , legendary entrepreneur and investor Peter Thiel shows how we can find singular ways to create those new things. Thiel begins with the contrarian premise that we live in an age of technological st
Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything
Don Tapscott, Anthony D. Williams · 337 pages
An updated edition of the national bestseller—now with a new introduction and a new chapterToday, encyclopedias, jetliners, operating systems, mutual funds, and many other items are being created by teams numbering in the thousands or even millions. While some leaders fear the heaving growth of these massive online communities, Wikinomics proves this fear is folly. Smart firms can harness collecti
Exponential Organizations: Why new organizations are ten times better, faster, cheaper than yours
Salim Ismail, Mike Malone, Yuri van Geest