Every genuinely new technology has a genuinely new way of breaking – and every now and then, those malfunctions open a new door to the adjacent possible. Sometimes the way a new technology breaks is a...
Most world-historic events - great military battles, political revolutions-are self-consciously historic to the participants living through them. They act knowing that their decisions will be chronicl...
Being right keeps you in place. Being wrong forces you to explore.
Time travelers tend, as a group, to have a lot of hobbies.
When you don't have to ask for permission innovation thrives.
Chance favors the connected mind.
The larger question is, as virologist Jonas Salk once asked, Are we being good ancestors?
Build a tangled bank.
Old ideas can sometimes use new buildings. New ideas must use old buildings.
If you look at history, innovation doesn't come just from giving people incentives; it comes from creating environments where their ideas can connect.
…it is the public sector I find more interesting, because governments and other non-market institutions have long suffered from the innovation malaise of top-heavy bureaucracies. Today, these institut...
Superstition, then and now, is not just a threat to the truth. It’s also a threat to national security.
Bill Gates (and his successor at Microsoft, Ray Ozzie) are famous for taking annual reading vacations. During the year they deliberately cultivate a stack of reading material—much of it unrelated to t...
The trick to having good ideas is not to sit around in glorious isolation and try to think big thoughts. The trick is to get more parts on the table.
The patterns are simple, but followed together, they make for a whole that is wiser than the sum of its parts. Go for a walk; cultivate hunches; write everything down, but keep your folders messy; emb...
Calculus, the electrical battery, the telephone, the steam engine, the radio - all these groundbreaking innovations were hit upon by multiple inventors working in parallel with no knowledge of one ano...
Diverse, horizontal social networks, in Ruef’s analysis, were three times more innovative than uniform, vertical networks. In groups united by shared values and long-term familiarity, conformity and c...
The second precondition is that the network be plastic, capable of adopting new configurations.
The wetland created by the beaver, like the thriving platform created by the Twitter founders, invites variation because it is an open platform where resources are shared as much as they are protected...
Innovations usually begin life with an attempt to solve a specific problem, but once they get into circulation, they end up triggering other changes that would have been extremely difficult to predict...