Connecting ideas is the fundamental creative act in innovation. If this is the case, how do we get better at it? I was being interviewed in my office by a student yesterday for a project that she’s doing. As we talked, she kept looking at my bookshelves, with an increasingly confused look on her face. […]
What is the innovation that led to civilization? There are some interesting answers to this question in Why the West Rules, For Now by Ian Morris. As part of his research, Morris has developed a Social Development Index, which he uses to track the progress of civilizations from 14000 BC to present. The index tracks […]
I’m currently attending the XIIth European Conference on Creativity and Innovation. It’s much less academic than most of the conferences I go to, which is a refreshing change. I ran into a problem yesterday, though, which got me thinking. I gave my workshop on the first day. About 20 people came to it, and they […]
One of the major obstacles to innovation is switching costs. Here’s a story that shows why: after 120 years, the main library at Princeton University is finally converting all of it’s books to the Library of Congress book classification system. This is remarkable for several reasons. The main one is that the Library of Congress […]
First up, from John Maynard Keynes in The General Theory of Employment, Interest & Money: The difficulty lies not so much in developing new ideas as in escaping from old ones. As I’ve said before, when you’re innovating, you have to break connections before you can make new ones. This is a big part of […]
