When it's a sharing and improvisational meeting, where you're riffing off other people's ideas, that actually can be productive. — Steven Johnson Copy Share Image
We are often better served by connecting ideas than we are by protecting them. — Steven Johnson Copy Share Image
If you look at where innovation - defined as ideas, not as commercial product - tends to live, the university system is… — Steven Johnson Copy Share Image
“Berners-Lee was supremely lucky in the work environment he had settled into, the Swiss particle physics lab CERN. It took him ten… — Steven Johnson Copy Share Image
Good ideas may not want to be free, but they do want to connect, fuse, recombine. They want to reinvent themselves by… — Steven Johnson Copy Share Image
The trick to having good ideas is not to sit around in glorious isolation and try to think big thoughts. The trick… — Steven Johnson Copy Share Image
“Babbage had most of this system sketched out by 1837, but the first true computer to use this programmable architecture didn’t appear… — Steven Johnson Copy Share Image
The patterns are simple, but followed together, they make for a whole that is wiser than the sum of its parts. Go… — Steven Johnson Copy Share Image
Those that regularly come into contact with people having diverse interests and viewpoints are more likely to come up with innovative ideas. — Steven Johnson Copy Share Image
“Bill Gates (and his successor at Microsoft, Ray Ozzie) are famous for taking annual reading vacations. During the year they deliberately cultivate… — Steven Johnson Copy Share Image
What I'm saying is individuals have better ideas if they're connected to rich, diverse networks of other individuals. If you put yourself… — Steven Johnson Copy Share Image
What you end up seeing when you look at history is that people who have been good at pushing the boundaries of… — Steven Johnson Copy Share Image
If you look at history, innovation doesn't come just from giving people incentives; it comes from creating environments where their ideas can… — Steven Johnson Copy Share Image
Most new movements start this way: hundreds or thousands of individuals and groups, working in different fields and different locations, start thinking about change… — Steven Johnson Copy Share Image
“Edison invented the lightbulb the way Steve Jobs invented the MP3 player: he wasn’t the first, but he was the first to make something… — Steven Johnson Copy Share Image
“Early risers strolling along the Thames would see the toshers wading through the muck of low tide, dressed almost comically in flowing velveteen coats,… — Steven Johnson Copy Share Image
If we didn't have genetic mutations, we wouldn't have us. You need error to open the door to the adjacent possible. — Steven Johnson Copy Share Image
The problem is, there are definitely some genuinely lame things on television, and there's more at the bottom of the barrel, because the barrel… — Steven Johnson Copy Share Image
Organizations that empower folks further down the chain or try to get rid of the big hierarchal chains and allow decision making to happen… — Steven Johnson Copy Share Image
“The birth of the civil rights movement was intimately bound up in the spread of jazz music throughout the United States. It was, for… — Steven Johnson Copy Share Image
Popular culture, on average, has been growing more cognitively challenging over the past thirty years, not less. Despite everything you hear about declining standards… — Steven Johnson Copy Share Image
“From am overall eclsyste,s perspective, if you're going to have 10million human beings trying to share an environment with other life-forms, it's much better… — Steven Johnson Copy Share Image
Nothing really says ... interactivity - which was so exciting and captures the real, the Web Zeitgeist of 1995 - than 'Click here for… — Steven Johnson Copy Share Image
“An innovation, or cluster of innovations, in one field ends up triggering changes that seem to belong to a different domain altogether.” — Steven Johnson Copy Share Image
