Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation Quotes

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Silicon-based life may be impossible for one other reason: silicon bonds readily dissolve in water.

Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation

Bill Gates (and his successor at Microsoft, Ray Ozzie) are famous for taking annual reading vacations. During the year they deliberately cultivate a stack of reading material—much of it unrelated to their day-to-day focus at Microsoft—and then th...

Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation

The trick to having good ideas is not to sit around in glorious isolation and try to think big thoughts. The trick is to get more parts on the table.

Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation

Being right keeps you in place. Being wrong forces you to explore.

Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation

…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 ...

Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation

Legendary innovators like Franklin, Snow, and Darwin all possess some common intellectual qualities—a certain quickness of mind, unbounded curiosity—but they also share one other defining attribute. They have a lot of hobbies.

Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation

Berners-Lee was supremely lucky in the work environment he had settled into, the Swiss particle physics lab CERN. It took him ten years to nurture his slow hunch about a hypertext information platform.

Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation

Chance favors the connected mind.

Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation

The patterns are simple, but followed together, they make for a whole that is wiser than the sum of its parts. Go for a walk; cultivate hunches; write everything down, but keep your folders messy; embrace serendipity; make generative mistakes; take o...

Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation

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.

Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation

Old ideas can sometimes use new buildings. New ideas must use old buildings.

Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation

Good ideas may not want to be free, but they do want to connect, fuse, recombine. They want to reinvent themselves by crossing conceptual borders. They want to complete each other as much as they want to compete

Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation

Babbage had most of this system sketched out by 1837, but the first true computer to use this programmable architecture didn’t appear for more than a hundred years.

Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation

When you don't have to ask for permission innovation thrives.

Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation