Quotes About Innovation

we are often better served by connecting ideas than we are by protecting them.

Go for a walk; cultivate hunches; write everything down, but keep your folders messy; embrace serendipity; make generative mistakes; take on multiple hobbies; frequent coffeehouses and other liquid networks; follow the links; let others build on your ideas; borrow, recycle, reinvent. Build a tangled bank.

PRINTING PRESS (1440)

CONCAVE LENS (1451)

Once key ideas from idea-spaces that otherwise had little contact with one another were connected, they began, quasi-autonomously, to make new sense in terms of one another, leading to the emergence of a whole that was more than the sum of its parts.

TERRESTRIAL GLOBE (1492)

PORTABLE WATCHES (1500)

EARTH ROTATES AROUND SUN (1514)

CUBIC EQUATIONS AND COMPLEX NUMBERS (1530-1540)

When nature is in need of new ideas, it strives to connect, not protect.

Steven Johnson

STEAM TURBINE (1551)

But it is clear that Gutenberg had no formal experience pressing grapes. His radical breakthrough relied, instead, on the ubiquity of the screw press in Rhineland wine-making culture, and on his ability to reach out beyond his specific field of expertise and concoct new uses for an older technology.

Steven Johnson

exaptation. An organism develops a trait optimized for a specific use, but then the trait gets hijacked for a completely different function.

What we are seeing now is arguably the largest mass migration in human history, and the first to be triggered by a home appliance.

STOCKING FRAME (1589)

TELESCOPE (1600--1610)

ELLIPTICAL ORBITS (1605--1609)

if you look at the entirety of the twentieth century, the most important developments in mass, one-to-many communications clock in at the same social innovation rate with an eerie regularity. Call it the 10/ 10 rule: a decade to build the new platform, and a decade for it to find a mass audience.

Hurley, Chen, and Karim cobbled together a rough beta for a service that would correct these deficiencies, raised less than $ 10 million in venture capital, hired about two dozen people, and launched YouTube, a website that utterly transformed the way video information is shared online. Within sixteen months of the company's founding, the service was streaming more than 30 million videos a day. Within two years, YouTube was one of the top-ten most visited sites on the Web.

Some will say that this is merely a matter of software, which is intrinsically more adaptable than hardware like televisions or cellular phones. But before the Web became mainstream in the mid-1990s, the pace of software innovation followed the exact same 10/ 10 pattern of development that we saw in the spread of other twentieth-century technologies.

This is a book about the space of innovation. Some environments squelch new ideas; some environments seem to breed them effortlessly. The city and the Web have been such engines of innovation because, for complicated historical reasons, they are both environments that are powerfully suited for the creation, diffusion, and adoption of good ideas.

If you're trying to "transform reality" you need to give your ideas the time they need to mature; don't just look for sudden epiphanies. Cultivate your hunches.