Quotes About Ideas

Any organization can conceivably accumulate dozens if not hundreds of concepts (ideas and opportunities). There are never enough resources to work on all these good ideas; instead they have to be evaluated, vetted, and culled. Most

The history of knowledge conventionally focuses on breakthrough ideas and conceptual leaps. But the blind spots on the map, the dark continents of error and prejudice, carry their own mystery as well. How could so many intelligent people be so grievously wrong for such an extended period of time? How could they ignore so much overwhelming evidence that contradicted their most basic theories? These questions, too, deserve their own discipline—the sociology of error.

This is not mere sentimentality. The triumph of twentieth-century metropolitan life is, in a real sense, the triumph of one image over the other: the dark ritual of deadly epidemics replaced by the convivial exchanges of strangers from different backgrounds sharing ideas on the sidewalk.

We have a natural tendency to romanticize breakthrough innovations, imagining momentous ideas transcending their surroundings, a gifted mind somehow seeing over the detritus of old ideas and ossified tradition. But ideas are works of bricolage; they're built out of that detritus.

A metropolis shares one key characteristic with the Web: both environments are dense, liquid networks where information easily flows along multiple unpredictable paths. Those interconnections nurture great ideas, because most great ideas come into the world half-baked, more hunch than revelation. Genuine insights are hard to come by;

You need a system for capturing hunches, but not necessarily categorizing them, because categories can build barriers between disparate ideas, restrict them to their own conceptual islands. This is one way in which the human history of innovation deviates from the natural history. New ideas do not thrive on archipelagos.

innovation scholar Richard Ogle calls an "idea-space": a complex of tools, beliefs, metaphors, and objects of study.

it is the public sector I find more interesting, because governments and other non-market institutions have long suffered from the innovation malaise of top-heavy bureaucracies. Today, these institutions have an opportunity to fundamentally alter the way they cultivate and promote good ideas. The more the government thinks of itself as an open platform instead of a centralized bureaucracy, the better it will be for all of us, citizens and activists, and entrepreneurs alike.

The river of intellectual progress is not defined purely by the steady flow of good ideas begetting better ones; it follows the topography that has been carved out for it by external factors. Sometimes that topography throws up so many barricades that the river backs up for a while.

IDEAS TRICKLE OUT OF SCIENCE, into the flow of commerce, where they drift into the less predictable eddies of art and philosophy.

Why have so many good ideas flourished in the fourth quadrant, despite the lack of economic incentives? One answer is that economic incentives have a much more complicated relationship to the development and adoption of good ideas than we usually imagine. The promise of an immense payday encourages people to come up with useful innovations, but at the same time it forces people to protect those innovations.

If ideas were fully liberated, then entrepreneurs wouldn't be able to profit from their innovations, because their competitors would immediately adopt them. And so where innovation is concerned, we have deliberately built inefficient markets: environments that protect copyrights and patents and trade secrets and a thousand other barricades we've erected to keep promising ideas out of the minds of others.

Universities have a reputation for ivory-tower isolation from the real world, but it is an undeniable fact that most of the paradigmatic ideas in science and technology that arose during the past century have roots in academic research.

Está en la naturaleza de las buenas ideas el subirse a hombros de los gigantes que las precedieron, lo que implica que, en alguna medida, toda innovación importante resulta ser fundamentalmente una red.

Steven Johnson

That cognitive overlap is what makes this mode so innovative. The current project can exapt ideas from the projects at the margins, make new connections. It is not so much a question of thinking outside the box, as it is allowing the mind to move through multiple boxes.

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 we want to understand where good ideas come from, we have to put them in context.

But how do you get those particular clusters of neurons to fire at the right time? One way is to go for a walk. The history of innovation is replete with stories of good ideas that occurred to people while they were out on a stroll. (A similar phenomenon occurs with long showers or soaks in a tub; in fact, the original "eureka" moment—Archimedes hitting upon a way of measuring the volume of irregular shapes—occurred in a bathtub.)

When you think about ideas in their native state of neural networks, two key preconditions become clear. First, the sheer size of the network: you can't have an epiphany with only three neurons firing. The network needs to be densely populated.

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.

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.

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.