And of course, if they do recognize that they are living through a historical crisis, it’s often too late—because, like it or not, the primary way that ordinary people create this distinct genre of hi...
An innovation, or cluster of innovations, in one field ends up triggering changes that seem to belong to a different domain altogether.
When one looks at innovation in nature and in culture, environments that build walls around good ideas tend to be less innovative in the long run than more open-ended environments.
The hummingbird effect. An innovation, or cluster of innovations, in one field ends up triggering changes that seem to belong to a different domain altogether.
The technology is not a single cause of a cultural transformation like the Renaissance, but it is, in many ways, just as important to the story as the human visionaries that we conventionally celebrat...
How do you get those particular clusters of neurons to fire at the right time? One way is to go for a walk. The history of innovation is replete with stories of good ideas that occurred to people whil...
As the historian Tom Standage observes, they were among the first to recognize the importance of trademarks and advertising, of slogans, logos…. Since the remedies themselves usually cost very little...
When it first emerged, Twitter was widely derided as a frivolous distraction that was mostly good for telling your friends what you had for breakfast. Now it is being used to organize and share news a...
We have a natural tendency to romanticize breakthrough innovations, imagining momentous ideas transcending their surroundings, a gifted mind somehow seeing over the detritus of old ideas and ossified...
To a certain extent, Ruef’s and Burt’s research is a validation of the celebrated strength of weak ties argument first proposed by Mark Granovetter,
This is not mere sentimentality. The triumph of twentieth-century metropolitan life is, in a real sense, the triumph of one image over the other: the dark ritual of deadly epidemics replaced by the co...
There’s a reason why the world’s wealthiest people—people with near-infinite options vis-à-vis the choice of where to make their home—consistently choose to live in the densest areas on the planet. Ul...
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 Twitter team took the exact opposite approach. They built the API first, and exposed all the data that was crucial to the service, and then they built Twitter.com on top of the API.
Thanks to the printing press, the Continent was suddenly populated by people who were experts at manipulating light through slightly convex pieces of glass. These were the hackers of the first optical...
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...
No one recognized – and exploited – this new power more quickly than Adolf Hitler,
No doubt some of the euphoria about the Internet’s egalitarian promise was overstated, and some advocates did veer into genuine Net utopianism at times. But the people I was interested in were not eva...
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...
La cuestión es inventarse formas de explorar los límites posibles de lo que te rodea. Esto puede ser tan sencillo como cambiar el entorno físico en el trabajo, o cultivar un tipo específico de red soc...