Time travelers tend, as a group, to have a lot of hobbies.
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...
Being right keeps you in place. Being wrong forces you to explore.
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...
When you don't have to ask for permission innovation thrives.
The larger question is, as virologist Jonas Salk once asked, Are we being good ancestors?
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...
Build a tangled bank.
If you look at history, innovation doesn't come just from giving people incentives; it comes from creating environments where their ideas can connect.
Superstition, then and now, is not just a threat to the truth. It’s also a threat to national security.
Old ideas can sometimes use new buildings. New ideas must use old buildings.
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...
Chance favors the connected mind.
Silicon-based life may be impossible for one other reason: silicon bonds readily dissolve in water.
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...
…let winged Fancy wander Through the thought still spread beyond her: Open wide the mind’s cage-door… —KEATS
…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...
The second precondition is that the network be plastic, capable of adopting new configurations.
This is not the wisdom of the crowd, but the wisdom of someone in the crowd. It’s not that the network itself is smart; it’s that the individuals get smarter because they’re connected to the network.
The march of technology expands the space of possibility around us, but how we explore that space is up to us.
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