innovation
My job is simply to design gadgets that I like
To read things that are not yet on the page
A new gestalt
Upstream, Downstream
I choose a world with pyramids
Which would you choose: a world with pyramids? Or without?
Humanity has always dreamt of flight, but the dream is cursed. My aircraft are destined to become tools for slaughter and destruction. But still, I choose a world with pyramids in it. Which world will you choose?
The Innovation Funnel
A Comic by Tom FishburneMost organizations use some version of an innovation funnel to bring ideas to life. It starts with lots of ideas at the front end and then launches whatever survives all the way to the back end.
Yet this Darwinian process of bringing ideas to life doesn’t necessarily lead to survival of the fittest ideas. If we’re not careful, the innovation funnel leads to survival of the safest ideas.
Organizations are good at spotting risks. In an effort to improve success rates, organizations tend to put sharper teeth in the funnel.
As ideas run the organizational gauntlet, they can get pruned, sheared, shaped, and watered down beyond recognition. On the way, they can lose the essence of the idea. They may lose their point of difference and reason for being.
Celebrating Steve
A Video by Steve JobsWhen you grow up, you tend to get told that the world is the way it is, and you're meant to just live your life inside the world and try not to bash into the walls too much...but life can be much broader, once you discover one simple fact – and that is, that everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you. And you can change it. You can influence it. You can build your own things that other people can use.
Traditional companies are losing because they mismanage software engineers
An Article by Emma WattersonInnovation is messy, and frankly Anti-Steve [Jobs] can’t figure out why you wouldn’t just tell people the right thing to build and skip all the trial and error that comes with innovation. Anti-Steve and his board of directors that keep him in place fundamentally believe that they know what needs to be built. Or at least that they can hire the messiah that will come down off the mountain and tell everyone what to build. There is no such messiah.
Withered or seasoned?
An Article by Robin SloanThe Nintendo way of adapting technology is not to look for the state of the art but to utilize mature technology that can be mass-produced cheaply.
This is the reason a Nintendo console never has the fastest chips or the beefiest specs of its generation; instead, its remixes components in an interesting and generative way. Think of the Gameboy’s monochrome screen, the Wii’s motion controller, the Switch’s smartphone form.
[Gunpei Yokoi] is talking about reliability and predictability, in performance and supply alike. He wants the components to be boring, so their application can be daring.
Who Becomes an Inventor in America? The Importance of Exposure to Innovation
A Research PaperWe directly establish the importance of environment by showing that exposure to innovation during childhood has significant causal effects on children's propensities to invent. Children whose families move to a high-innovation area when they are young are more likely to become inventors. These exposure effects are technology-class and gender specific.
Age of Invention
A Series by Anton HowesI’m a historian of innovation. I write mostly about the causes of Britain’s Industrial Revolution, focusing on the lives of the individual innovators who made it happen. I’m interested in everything from the exploits of sixteenth-century alchemists to the schemes of Victorian engineers. My research explores why they became innovators, and the institutions they created to promote innovation even further.
The monkey, the tiger beetle and the language of innovation
An Article by Courtney HohneWhat we’ve learned from 10 years of moonshot taking about choosing your words wisely — and the many benefits of doing so:
- v0.crap
- Tiger Beetle Moments
- Killing our projects
- In the fog
- The Altimeter
- The Icebergs
- Headwinds & Tailwinds
- Chaos Pilots
- Patiently impatient, responsibly irresponsible, passionately dispassionate
Ancient magicians as innovation consultants
An Article by Matt WebbThe Codex Justinianus (534 AD), being the book of law for ancient Rome at that time, banned magicians and, in doing so, itemised the types:
- A haruspex is one who prognosticates from sacrificed animals and their internal organs;
- a mathematicus, one who reads the course of the stars;
- a hariolus, a soothsayer, inhaling vapors, as at Delphi;
- augurs, who read the future by the flight and sound of birds;
- a vates, an inspired person - prophet;
- chaldeans and magus are general names for magicians;
- maleficus means an enchanter or poisoner.
I happen to have spent my career in a number of fields that promise to have some kind of claim to supernatural powers: design, innovation, startups…
It’s not hard to run through a few archetypes of the people in those worlds, and map them onto types of ancient magician.
- Those like Steve Jobs (with his famous Reality Distortion Field) who can convincingly tell a story of the future, and by doing so, bring it about by getting others to follow them – prophets.
- Inhaling the vapours and pronouncing gnomic truths? You’ll find all the thought leaders you want in Delphi, sorry, on LinkedIn.
- Those with a good intuition about the future who bring it to life with theatre, and putting people in a state of great excitement so they respond – ad planners. Haruspex.
- Those who have the golden mane of charisma: enchanters. Startup founders.
- People with a great aptitude for systems and numbers, who can tell by intuition what will happen, from systems that stump the rest of us. We call them analysts now. MBAs. Perhaps the same aptitude drew them to read the stars before? Mathematicus.
The Small Group
An Article by James MulhollandLying somewhere between a club and a loosely defined set of friends, the SMALL GROUP is a repeated theme in the lives of the successful. Benjamin Franklin had the Junto Club, Tolkien and C.S. Lewis had The Inklings, Jobs and Wozniak had Homebrew.
Around a dozen members is the sweet spot of social motivation: small enough to know everyone, yet large enough that the group won’t collapse if one or two members’ enthusiasm wanes; small enough that you are not daunted by competing with the whole world, yet large enough that you still need to be on your toes to keep up.
On Love
Not knowing quite what they mean
"Do you understand all the symbolism?"
"Not really, besides its being Venus and Cupid."
"I didn't even know that, so you're one up on me. I wish I'd read more about ancient mythology," she continued. "But actually, I like looking at things and not knowing quite what they mean."
We're not children, you know
We're not children, you know.
And with these words, she placed her lips on mine and we embarked on one of the longer and more beautiful kisses mankind has ever known.
To think
Few things are as antithetical to sex as thought. Sex is instinctive, unreflective, and spontaneous, while thought is careful, uninvolved, and judgmental. To think during sex is to violate a fundamental law of intercourse.
A cruel paradox
When we look at someone (an angel) from a position of unrequited love and imagine the pleasures that being in heaven with them might bring us, we are prone to overlook a significant danger: how soon their attractions might pale if they began to love us back. We fall in love because we long to escape from ourselves with someone as ideal as we are corrupt. But what if such a being were one day to turn around and love us back? We can only be shocked. How could they be as divine as we had hoped when they have the bad taste to approve of someone like us? If in order to love we must believe that the beloved surpasses us in some way, does not a cruel paradox emerge when we witness this love returned? "If s/he really is so wonderful, how could s/he love someone like me?"
Shoes
It was perhaps a pedantic matter over which to come to such a decision, but shoes are supreme symbols of aesthetic, and hence by extension psychological, compatibility. Certain areas and coverings of the body say more about a person than others: shoes suggest more than pullovers, thumbs more than elbows, underwear more than overcoats, ankles more than shoulders.
I marshmallow you
Then I noticed a small plate of complimentary marshmallows near Chloe's elbow and it suddenly seemed clear that I didn't love Chloe so much as marshmallow her. What it was about a marshmallow that should suddenly have accorded so perfectly with my feelings toward her, I will never know, but the word seemed to capture the essence of my amorous state with an accuracy that the word 'love', weary with overuse, simply could not aspire to.
From then on, love was, for Chloe and me at least, no longer simply love, it was a sugary, puffy object a few millimeters in diameter that melts deliciously in the mouth.
A social animal
What does it mean that man is a "social animal"? Only that humans need one another in order to define themselves and achieve self-consciousness, in a way that mollusks and earthworms do not. We cannot come to a proper sense of ourselves if there aren't others around to show us what we're like.
"A man can acquire anything in solitude except a character," wrote Stendhal.
Possible lives
Watching Alice talk, light a candle that had blown out, rush into the kitchen with the plates, or brush a strand of blonde hair from her face, I found myself falling victim to romantic nostalgia, which descends whenever we are faced with those who might have been our lovers, but whom chance has decreed we will never properly know. The possibility of an alternative love story is a reminder that the life we are leading is only one of a myriad of possible lives, and it is the impossibility of leading them all that plunges us into sadness.
The threat of happiness
Dr. Saavedra had diagnosed a case of anhedonia, a disease defined by the British Medical Association as a reaction remarkably close to mountain sickness resulting from the sudden terror brought on by the threat of happiness. It was a common disease among tourists in this region of Spain, faced in these idyllic surroundings with the sudden realization that earthly happiness might be within their grasp, and prey therefore to a violent physiological reaction designed to counteract such a daunting possibility.
I don't see a wall
"I don't know, really. It's just a sense I have that ever since about the middle of September, we haven't really been communicating. It's like there's a wall between us and you're refusing to acknowledge it's there."
"I don't see a wall."
"That's what I mean. You're refusing to admit there was ever anything other than this."
"Than what?"
Romantic terrorism
Once a partner has begun to lose interest, there is apparently little the other can do to arrest the process. Like seduction, withdrawal suffers under a blanket of reticence. The very breakdown of communication is hard to discuss, unless both parties have a desire to see it restored.
This leaves the lover in a desperate situation. Honest dialogue seems to produce only irritation and smothers love in the attempt to revive it. Desperate to woo the partner back at any cost, the lover might at this point be tempted to turn to romantic terrorism, the product of irredeemable situations, a gamut of tricks (sulking, jealousy, guilt) that attempt to force the partner to return love, by blowing up (in fits of tears, rage, or otherwise) in front of the loved one. The terroristic partner knows he cannot realistically hope to see his love reciprocated, but the futility of something is not always (in love or in politics) a sufficient argument against it.
Certain things are said not because they will be heard, but because it is important to speak.
Walls
As the plane pierced through the clouds, I tried to imagine a future: a period of life was coming brutally to an end, and I had nothing to replace it with, only a terrifying absence.
What would life mean from now on? Though we continued holding hands, I knew how Chloe and I would watch our bodies grow foreign to each other. Walls would be build up, the separation would be institutionalized, I would meet her in a few months or years, we would be light, jovial, masked, dressed for business, ordering a salad in a restaurant—unable to touch what we were now revealing: the sheer human drama, the nakedness, the dependency, the unalterable loss. We would be like an audience emerging from a heart-wrenching play but unable to communicate any of the emotions they had felt inside, able only to head for a drink at the bar, knowing there was more, but unable to touch it.
In order that
No philosophy is further from the thought that what happens to us is random than psychoanalysis. I did not simply love Chloe and then she left me. I loved Chloe in order that she would leave me. It was not for the shape of her smile or the liveliness of her mind that I had chosen Chloe. It was because the unconscious, perverse casting director of my life had recognized in her a suitable character to leave the stage after inflicting the requisite amount of suffering.
The significance of love's burden
There is an Arabic saying that the soul travels at the pace of a camel. While most of our self is led by the strict demands of timetables and diaries, our soul, the seat of the heart, trails nostalgically behind, burdened by the weight of memory. If every love affair adds a certain weight to the camel's load, then we can expect the soul to slow according to the significance of love's burden.
What does wisdom counsel?
We start trying to be wise when we realize that we are not born knowing how to live, that living one's life is a skill that has to be acquired, like learning to ride a bicycle or play the piano. But what does wisdom counsel us to do? It tells us to aim for tranquility and inner peace, a life free from anxiety, fear, idolatry, and harmful passions. Wisdom teaches us that our first impulses may not always be trustworthy, and that our appetites will lead us astray if we do not train reason to separate vain from genuine needs.
Once again begun to fall
Such lessons appeared all the more relevant when Rachel accepted my invitation for dinner the following week, and the very thought of her began sending tremors through the region the poets have called the heart, tremors that I knew could have meant one thing only—that I had once again begun to fall.