Johansson Franz. The Medici Effect: Breakthrough Insights at the Intersection of Ideas, Concepts, and Cultures

Harvard Business School Press, 2004. — 207 p.A diverse research team discovers how to read the mind of a monkey. A chef mixes unexpected ingredients such as sea urchins and lollipops to transform the world of professional cooking. An engineer borrows from the foraging behavior of ants to work out surveillance patterns for unmanned aerial vehicles in war zones. What these trailblazers share is not just the breakthrough nature of their discoveries, but where they went to find fiem. According to Frans Johansson, these innovators are changing the world by stepping into the lntersection: a place where ideas from different fields and cultures meet and collide, ultimately igniting an explosion of extraordinary new discoveries. Johansson calls this proliferation of new ideas "the Medici effect"-referring to the remarkable burst of creativity enabled by the Medici banking family in Renaissance ltaly. In this fascinating book, he reveals how we can find intersections in our own lives and turn the ideas we find there into pathbreaking innovations. Johansson illustrates how three driving forces-the movement of people, the convergence of scientific disciplines, and the leap in computational power-are increasing the number and types of intersections we can access.