The observers of the time were detecting a phenomenon that we now largely take for granted: that mass behavior can often diverge strikingly from the desires of the individuals that make up the mass.
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...
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...
The second precondition is that the network be plastic, capable of adopting new configurations.
The time travelers are usually adapt at intercrossing different fields of expertise. That's the beauty of the hobbyist: it's generally easier to mix different intellectual fields when you have a whole...
The timing of Thomas Lewis’ illness suggests one chilling alternative history. The Broad Street outbreak had subsided in part because the only viable route between the well and the neighborhood’s smal...
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 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...
There was no lightbulb moment in the story of the lightbulb. By the time Edison flipped the switch at the Pearl Street station, a handful of other firms were already selling their own models of incand...
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.
They mistook the smoke for the fire.
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...
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.
This may be one of the most astonishing, and tragic, hummingbird effects in all of twentieth-century technology: someone builds a machine to listen to sound waves bouncing off icebergs, and a few gene...
Those early spectacles were called roidi da ogli, meaning disks for the eyes. Thanks to their resemblance to lentil beans—lentes in Latin—the disks themselves came to be called lenses.
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,
Up to now, the philosophers of emergence have struggled to interpret the world. But they are now starting to change it.
Cities have marvelous innate abilities for understanding, communicating, contriving and inventing what is required to combat their difficulties, she wrote. They get their order from below; they are le...
What Ruef discovered was a ringing endorsement of the coffeehouse model of social networking: the most creative individuals in Ruef’s survey consistently had broad social networks that extended outsid...
When you don't have to ask for permission innovation thrives.
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