Quotes from John Seely Brown

The need for innovation – the lifeblood of business – is widely recognized, and imagination and play are key ingredients for making it happen.

Practice provides the rails on which knowledge flows.

The job of leadership today is not just to make money, it's to make meaning.

If you can design the physical space, the social space, and the information space together to enhance collaborative learning, then that whole milieu turns into a learning technology.

It's been said that if NASA wanted to go to the moon again, it would have to start from scratch, having lost not the data, but the human expertise that took it there the last time.

Processes don't do work, people do

The Harder you fight to hold on to specific assumptions, the more likely there's gold in letting go of them.

Institutions designed for push cannot easily accommodate pull.

As the Big Shift takes hold, companies are no longer places that exist to drive down costs by getting increasingly bigger. They're places that support and organize talented individuals to get better faster by working with others. The rationale of the firm shifts from scalable efficiency to scalable learning—the ability to improve performance more rapidly and learn faster by effectively integrating more and more participants distributed across traditional institutional boundaries.

We all have passions.

Rather than focusing on attracting and retaining talent, as they do today, institutional leaders must shift their attention to accessing and developing talent.

Institutional leaders will need to seek out "reverse mentors" among (often younger) individuals who can help them understand and master edge practices.

Core participants tend to focus on transactions rather than investing in the long-term effort to build sustainable, trust-based relationships on the edge.

the success of creation spaces can be traced back to careful design at the outset by a small group of people who were very thoughtful about the conditions required to foster or "scaffold" scalable collaboration, learning, and performance improvement.

Our research into emerging creation spaces has identified three elements that combine to set in motion the increasing-returns dynamics that make these spaces successful: participants, interactions, and environments.

Rather than molding individuals to fit the needs of the institution, institutions will be shaped to provide platforms to help individuals achieve their full potential by connecting with others and better addressing challenging performance needs.

Push" describes a method and means of organizing activities and actions. Push operates on a key assumption—that it is possible to forecast or anticipate demand. Based on this assumption, push works mightily to ensure that the right people and resources are delivered at the right place and the right time to serve the anticipated demand.

The digital infrastructure makes outsourcing more feasible than ever, and this in turn makes it easier for small companies to access and use world-class capability to deliver more value to their markets and to respond more rapidly to unanticipated changes in markets.

True innovation does not happen when we control creativity," Shai wrote in 2005, "but when we challenge, create shared vision, and passionately pursue excellence."3

If you don't have a disposition to question, you're going to fear change. But if you're comfortable questioning, experimenting, connecting things—then change is something that becomes an adventure. And if you can see it as an adventure, then you're off and running.

When people chase what they love, they will inevitably seek out and immerse themselves in knowledge flows, drinking deeply from new creative wells even as they contribute their own experiences and insights along the way.

Passion in this context refers to a sustained and deep commitment to achieving our full potential and greater capacity for self-expression in a domain that engages us on a personal level.

No one will be able to effectively participate in relevant knowledge flows without possessing useful knowledge stocks of their own. People who reach out to connect with others to simply take knowledge will find that these interactions quickly dry up as others begin to realize they have little to gain from these connections. As in all relationships, reciprocity is essential. Knowledge stocks thus become both a means and an end to participation in knowledge flows.

In pull platforms, the modules are designed to be loosely coupled, with interfaces that help users to understand what the module contains and how it can be accessed. Because of this loosely coupled modular design, pull platforms can accommodate a much larger number of diverse participants. In fact, pull platforms tend to have increasing returns dynamics—the more participants and modules the platform can attract, the more valuable the platform becomes.