innovation culture

Free market logic describes how the laws of supply and demand incentivize providing the best goods at the lowest prices. But custom means economic decisions are made unthinkingly, outsourced to tradition, which might be political, ideological, or even aesthetic in origin. By law and in practice, the entire U.S. banking system has been fully... See more

01. Fear of Being Wrong : Our decisions are often driven by Loss Aversion – the cognitive bias that makes us more afraid of failure than excited by potential success. In a world where a single misstep can get us “bollocked,’ we stick with what feels safe, even when it’s clearly not working.

But in this case, as at times in the past, Klein has brought a gavel to a knife fight. Progressives didn’t just adopt anti-growth attitudes because they were reacting to the excesses of Robert Moses. Anti-growth attitudes are motivated by more than just NIMBYism and fear of change. There are deep class resentments involved.

Taste is not some idea of good design and brand. That definition isn’t rooted in a single damn thing.

Taste is that personalizing moment, that got transferred spiritually. It’s Naoto Fukasawa’s idea of embodiment in design. It didn’t come from a vague notion of “being good”. NOOOOOOOOO it came from dropping in on that moment in life, being ready... See more

The first is procedural environmental laws . Instead of just making laws that say “don’t build things that encroach on endangered species”, like the developed nations of Europe and Asia do, America also makes laws that allow anyone and everyone to sue developers to force them to prove in court that they’re following all the relevant substantive... See more

Notably, this theory completely omits the role of the real estate developer, who has a greater influence than anyone else in how a building comes together. Skyscrapers are designed by architects, but it’s the developer who conceives of the project, arranges the funding, hires the design team, and ultimately decides what the building will be. To me,... See more

To be curious about that which confuses. Not too rapidly seeking the safety of knowing or the safety of a legible question, but waiting for a more powerful and subtle question to arise from loose and open attention. This patience with confusion makes them good at surfacing new questions. It is this capacity to surface questions that set... See more

Henderson and Clark cite Abernathy and Utterback (1978) who, if you’ll recall from Vertical Integrators: Part II :

co-authored a paper titled A Dynamic Model of Process and Product Innovation . By looking at a study of 120 firms, they found that product innovation is initially dominant but gradually gives way to process innovation as the product

... See more