If we think that innovation comes from a lone genius inventing a new technology from scratch, that model naturally steers us toward certain policy decisions, like stronger patent protection. But if we...
In the popular folklore of American history, there is a sense in which the founders’ various achievements in natural philosophy—Franklin’s electrical experiments, Jefferson’s botany—serve as a kind of...
It is hard for those of us who have lived in the postindustrial world our entire lives to understand just how much a shock the sound of industrialization was to human ears a century or two ago.
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...
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...
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...
Right now we’re in an arms race with the microbes, because, effectively, we’re operating on the same scale that they are. The viruses are both our enemy and our arms manufacturer.
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...
So part of the secret of hunch cultivation is simple: write everything down.
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.
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
As Lawrence Lessig has so persuasively argued over the years, there is nothing natural about the artificial scarcity of intellectual property law.
As Lynn Margulis writes: All the world’s bacteria essentially have access to a single gene pool and hence to the adaptive mechanisms of the entire bacterial kingdom. The speed of recombination over th...
DR. JOHN SNOW—This well-known physician died at noon on the 16th instant, at his house in Sackville-street, from an attack of apoplexy. His researches on chloroform and other anaesthetics were appreci...
Her research suggests a paradoxical truth about innovation: good ideas are more likely to emerge in environments that contain a certain amount of noise and error.
His research led him to one overwhelming conclusion, published in a seminal paper in 1975: big cities nurture subcultures much more effectively than suburbs or small towns.
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