Innovation scholar Richard Ogle calls an idea-space: a complex of tools, beliefs, metaphors, and objects of study.
The more disorganized your brain is, the smarter you are.
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.
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.
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.
De Forest was wrong about the utility of gas as a detector, but he kept probing at the edges of that error, until he hit upon something that was genuinely useful. Being right keeps you in place. Being...
Dense urban environments may do away with nature altogether—there are many vibrantly healthy neighborhoods in Paris or Manhattan that lack even a single tree—but they also perform the crucial service...
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...
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...
The FBI’s information network was a classic closed network: not only could outsiders not access information in it, but also, the system was designed so that documents were carefully shielded from othe...
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 how great intellectual breakthroughs usually happen in practice. It is rarely the isolated genius having a eureka moment alone in the lab. Nor is it merely a question of building on precedent,...
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...
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