Ironically, those walls have been erected with the explicit aim of encouraging innovation. They go by many names: patents, digital rights management, intellectual property, trade secrets, proprietary technology.

The poet and the engineer (and the coral reef) may seem a million miles apart in their particular forms of expertise, but when they bring good ideas into the world, similar patterns of development and collaboration shape that process.

The long-zoom approach lets us see that openness and connectivity may, in the end, be more valuable to innovation than purely competitive mechanisms.

If we want to understand where good ideas come from, we have to put them in context.

Call it the 10/10 rule: a decade to build the new platform, and a decade for it to find a mass audience.

As he reads through his observations, a new thought begins to take shape in his mind, which provokes a whole new set of notes that will only make complete sense to Darwin two years later, after the Malthus episode.

exaptations help us explore the new possibilities that lurk behind those doors. A

When Friedrich von Hayek launched his influential argument in the 1940s about the importance of price signals in market economies, he was observing a related phenomenon: the decentralized pricing mechanism of the marketplace allows an entrepreneur to gauge the relative value of his or her innovation. If you come up with an interesting new

What the adjacent possible tells us is that at any moment the world is capable of extraordinary change, but only certain changes can happen.