Fires in forests From contained to uncontrolled, as wind speed increases Individuals in companies From a focus on loonshots to a focus on careers, as size of company increases

Traffic engineers use these ideas to design better highways. Reducing speed limits in heavy traffic may seem counterintuitive, but it reduces the likelihood that a small disruption will cause a jam (it can shift the flow from point #3 in the diagram above to #1). Some highways use ramp metering: when the density and speed start to approach the

A loonshot refers to an idea or project that most scientific or business leaders think won’t work, or if it does, it won’t matter (it won’t make money). It challenges conventional wisdom. Whether a change is “disruptive” or not, on the other hand, refers to the effects of an invention on a market.

I soon learned that Bush developed a new system, during the Second World War, for nurturing radical breakthroughs astonishingly fast. His system helped the Allies win that war, and the United States lead the world in science and technology ever since. Bush’s goal: that the US should be the initiator, not the victim, of innovative surprise. What

Vail persuaded his new board of directors that to solve these problems, the company should create a quarantined group working on “fundamental” research. Like Bush, he understood the need for separating and sheltering radical ideas—the need for a department of loonshots run by loons, free to explore the bizarre. Vail put a physicist from MIT, Frank

People may think of Endo and Folkman as great inventors, but arguably their greatest skill was investigating failure. They learned to separate False Fails from true fails. Skill in investigating failure not only separates good scientists from great scientists but also good businessmen from great businessmen. In 2004, for example, when Facebook

Manage the transfer, not the technology Bush, although a brilliant inventor and engineer, pointedly stayed out of the details of any one loonshot. “I made no technical contribution whatever to the war effort,” he wrote. “Not a single technical idea of mine ever amounted to shucks. At times I have been called an ‘atomic scientist.’ It would be fully

In physics, you identify clues that reveal fundamental truths. You use those clues to build models that help explain the world around you.

A flawed transfer from inventors to the field is not the only danger. Transfer in the other direction is equally important. No product works perfectly the first time. If feedback from the field is ignored by inventors, initial enthusiasm can rapidly fade, and a promising program will be dropped. Early aircraft radar, for example, was practically