innovation

It is the kind of building that when entered can make you feel infused with the opportunity of a world very different from the one you used to know. This is the essence of a futurist architecture. It is the ethic to make a building that convinces people they are living in the future.

One area where I think we are especially distinctive is failure. I believe we are the best place in the world to fail (we have plenty of practice!), and failure and invention are inseparable twins. To invent you have to experiment, and if you know in advance that it’s going to work, it’s not an experiment. Most large organizations embrace the idea ... See more

But then I read Imre Lakatos’s Proofs and Refutations . It is not, at first glance, a book about writing. It is a book of mathematical philosophy. By a Hungarian Stalinist, no less. But it is, if you read it sideways, a profound exploration of the act of writing. This shouldn’t be a surprise. Mathematics is, after all, a subset of writing—it is a w... See more

The answer, I think, is what it almost always is: that inventors are simply extremely rare. People can have all the incentives, all the materials, all the mechanical skills, and even all the right general notions of how things work. As we’ve seen, even Savery himself was apparently inspired by the same ancient experiment as everyone else who worked... See more

Peter Drucker saidthat “business has only two functions — marketing and innovation .” Marketing and innovation have one thing in common – satisfying the unmet needs of the customer. The customer, thus, is at the heart of ecosystem thinking. And the customer lies outside the business.

The only value of cultural ideas is their ability to inform action in this true world. And because mass communication about complex new ideas is impossible, whatever ideas you have can only directly affect your own actions and those of your collaborators. This is the discipline of materialism. If you want anything of true excellence done, don’t bot... See more

Jobs: In the future, it won’t be an act of faith. The hard part of what we’re up against now is that people ask you about specifics and you can’t tell them. A hundred years ago, if somebody had asked Alexander Graham Bell, “What are you going to be able to do with a telephone?” he wouldn’t have been able to tell him the ways the telephone would aff... See more

When you’re focused on something few others are thinking about, you find yourself constantly making the case to yourself and others that your vision is worth pursuing and worthy of other people’s attention. This ongoing need to justify your work creates a significant emotional overhead.

Take a coniferous forest. The hierarchy in scale of pine needle, tree crown, patch, stand, whole forest, and biome is also a time hierarchy. The needle changes within a year, the crown over several years, the patch over many decades, the stand over a couple of centuries, the forest over a thousand years, and the biome over ten thousand years. The r... See more