Eureka! On the clustering of geniuses

For centuries, the myth of the lone genius has towered over us like a colossus. The idea that new, beautiful, world-changing things come from within great minds is now so common that we don’t even consider it an idea. These bronze statues have come to seem like old-growth trees—monuments to modern thinking that we mistake for part of the natural wo

There’s a healthier way of thinking about creativity that the musician Brian Eno refers to as “scenius.” Under this model, great ideas are often birthed by a group of creative individuals—artists, curators, thinkers, theorists, and other tastemakers—who make up an “ecology of talent.” If you look back closely at history, many of the people who we t

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 outside their organization and involved people from diverse fields of expertise.