Stephen Johnson

American science writer who wrote Where Good Ideas Come From, The Ghost Map, How We Got to Now, and Emergence — examining how innovation, cities, epidemiology, and complex systems work — one of the most popular science writers of the 21st century.

Created the most readable account of how innovation actually happens — Where Good Ideas Come From's argument that innovation is a product of the adjacent possible, slow hunches, serendipitous collisions, and the liquid network (neither too chaotic nor too rigid) replaced the myth of the lone genius breakthrough with a more accurate social and environmental account.