Like every big idea, Birdseye’s breakthrough was not a single insight, but a network of other ideas, packaged together in a new configuration. What made Birdseye’s idea so powerful was not simply his...
Cities were suddenly populated by a class of consumers, free to worry about other pressing matters: new technologies, new modes of commerce, politics, professional sports, celebrity gossip. That
The history of knowledge conventionally focuses on breakthrough ideas and conceptual leaps. But the blind spots on the map, the dark continents of error and prejudice, carry their own mystery as well....
Legendary innovators like Franklin, Snow, and Darwin all possess some common intellectual qualities—a certain quickness of mind, unbounded curiosity—but they also share one other defining attribute. T...
Jane Jacobs observed many years ago that one of the paradoxical effects of metropolitan life is that huge cities create environments where small niches can flourish. A store selling nothing but button...
The second analog-era mechanism that encourages serendipity involves the physical limitations of the print newspaper, which forces you to pass by a collection of artfully curated stories on a variety...
Sometimes the effect arrives thanks to a different kind of breakthrough: a dramatic increase in our ability to MEASURE something, and an improvement in the tools we build for measuring. New ways of me...
So part of the secret of hunch cultivation is simple: write everything down.
Most discoveries become imaginable at a very specific moment in history, after which point multiple people start to imagine them. The electric battery, the telegraph, the steam engine, and the digital...
Keeping a slow hunch alive poses challenges on multiple scales. For starters, you have to preserve the hunch in your own memory,
If there is a single maxim that runs through this book’s arguments, it is that we are often better served by connecting ideas than we are by protecting them.
Every time you glance down at your smartphone to check your location, you are unwittingly consulting a network of twenty-four atomic clocks housed in satellites in low-earth orbit above you.
Edison invented the lightbulb the way Steve Jobs invented the MP3 player: he wasn’t the first, but he was the first to make something that took off in the marketplace. So
But Engels and Dickens suggested a new twist: that the advance of civilization produced barbarity as an unavoidable waste product, as essential to its metabolism as the gleaming spires and cultivated...
A good idea is a network. A specific constellation of neurons—thousands of them—fire in sync with each other for the first time in your brain, and an idea pops into your consciousness.
The lightbulb was the kind of innovation that comes together over decades, in pieces. There was no lightbulb moment in the story of the lightbulb.
The computer scientist Christopher Langton observed several decades ago that innovative systems have a tendency to gravitate toward the edge of chaos:
That mix of order and anarchy is what we now call emergent behavior.
Semmelweis was derided and dismissed not just for daring to propose that doctors wash their hands; he was derided and dismissed for proposing that doctors wash their hands if they wanted to deliver ba...
Ronald Burt, looked at the origin of good ideas inside the organizational network of the Raytheon Corporation. Burt found that innovative thinking was much more likely to emerge from individuals who b...