Quotes About Innovation

The trick is to figure out ways to explore the edges of possibility that surround you.

shaking ourselves free of this common misconception: an idea is not a single thing. It is more like a swarm.

endangered joy of serendipity

La cuestión es inventarse formas de explorar los límites posibles de lo que te rodea. Esto puede ser tan sencillo como cambiar el entorno físico en el trabajo, o cultivar un tipo específico de red social, o mantener ciertos hábitos en la forma de buscar y archivar la información.

It turns out that good ideas have certain signature patterns in the networks that make them. The creating brain behaves differently from the brain that is performing a repetitive task.

to make your mind more innovative, you have to place it inside environments that share that same network signature: networks of ideas or people that mimic the neural networks of a mind exploring the boundaries of the adjacent possible.

Up to now, the philosophers of emergence have struggled to interpret the world. But they are now starting to change it.

Radios, vacuum tubes, transistors, televisions, solar cells, coaxial cables, laser beams, microprocessors, computers, cell phones, fiber optics—all these essential tools of modern life descend from ideas originally generated at Bell Labs.

The first electrical battery was invented separately by Dean Von Kleist and Cuneus of Leyden in 1745 and 1746. Joseph Priestley and Carl Wilhelm Scheele independently isolated oxygen between 1772 and 1774.

when we look back to the original innovation engine on earth, we find two essential properties. First, a capacity to make new connections with as many other elements as possible. And, second, a "randomizing" environment that encourages collisions between all the elements in the system.

When those parts became available, the discovery of oxygen entered the realm of the adjacent possible.

What made Bell Labs fundamentally different had as much to do with antitrust law as the geniuses it attracted.

With that increase in population came a crucial increase in the number of possible connections that could be formed within the group. Good ideas could more readily find their way into other brains and take root there. New forms of collaboration became possible.

somewhere within a thousand years of the first cities emerging, human beings invented a whole new way of inventing.

The simplest way to answer it is this: innovative environments are better at helping their inhabitants explore the adjacent possible, because they expose a wide and diverse sample of spare parts—mechanical or conceptual—and they encourage novel ways of recombining those parts.

high-density liquid networks make it easier for innovation to happen, but they also serve the essential function of storing those innovations. Before writing, before books, before Wikipedia, the liquid network of cities preserved the accumulated wisdom of human culture.

If you come up with an interesting new contraption, you don't need to persuade a government commission of its value. You just need to get someone to buy it.

Cities and markets recruit more minds into the collective project of exploring the adjacent possible. As long as there is spillover between those minds, useful innovations will be more likely to appear and spread through the population at large.

imagine a business problem as a maze. One person might be motivated to make it through the maze as quickly and safely as possible in order to get a tangible reward, such as money—the same way a mouse would rush through for a piece of cheese. This person would look for the simplest, most straightforward path and then take it. In fact, if he is in a real rush to get that reward, he might just take the most beaten path and solve the problem exactly as it has been solved before.

When the first market towns emerged in Italy, they didn't magically create some higher-level group consciousness. They simply widened the pool of minds that could come up with and share good ideas. This is not the wisdom of the crowd, but the wisdom of someone in the crowd. It's not that the network itself is smart; it's that the individuals get smarter because they're connected to the network.

While the creative walk can produce new serendipitous combinations of existing ideas in our heads, we can also cultivate serendipity in the way that we absorb new ideas from the outside world. Reading remains an unsurpassed vehicle for the transmission of interesting new ideas and perspectives.

If you looked at the map of idea formation that Dunbar created, the ground zero of innovation was not the microscope. It was the conference table.

anti-"lightbulb moment," the idea that comes into focus over decades, not seconds.

The secret to organizational inspiration is to build information networks that allow hunches to persist and disperse and recombine. Instead of cloistering your hunches in brainstorm sessions or R&D labs, create an environment where brainstorming is something that is constantly running in the background, throughout the organization, a collective version of the 20-percent-time concept that proved so successful for Google and 3M.