Combinatorial innovation is a cultural process for invention by which existing ideas are combined in novel ways to create new ideas. The resulting output is fed back into the process to generate more new ideas, ad infinitum. As more ideas are explored, more possibilities present themselves.
the internet is the greatest device for opening up the world ever devised. It is democratising and enabling. But that assumes its users draw on it to aid System 2 thinking. Plainly, there are times when we use it to inform key decisions – to find out about an illness, to research a holiday, to track a scientific breakthrough. But in the main the... See more
On the other side, new social spaces will continue to emerge and bring with them new rulesets, dynamics, and discovery algorithms to connect new people in new ways. We argue that this is the primary value of social networks and should be their sole focus: developing and providing different “flavors” of content and algorithms
A friend of mine recently felt dizzy and went to a US urgent care facility for blood tests. They were inconclusive and so he was sent to the nearby emergency room, which proceeded to do the same blood tests over again, because they were not able to access the urgent care facility's test results in their computer system. This was just plain wasted... See more
the most important new social networks of the last few years have been notable for not really being social networks at all.
I’m referring to the TikTok-ization of user-generated content: the reason why TikTok was such a blindspot for Facebook is that, unlike Snapchat, it doesn’t depend on network effects, but rather abundance.