Hugh MacLeod’s great daily newsletter (which you should subscribe to here) had this cartoon today: Don’t try to stand out from the crowd, avoid crowds altogether. In the commentary, he acknowledges that this might not align with the fantastic work that Mark Earls has been doing over the past few years. The basic point that […]
Here is a must-watch video from Eli Pariser discussing some of the themes from his new book The Filter Bubble (reviewed well here by Cory Doctorow). It’s only 9 minutes, and it is well worth your time: Pariser’s main point is that the primary filters on the internet these days are algorithmic, and that these […]
To succeed at innovation, you need to be making a lot of little bets. What are little bets? According to Peter Sims in his excellent book called Little Bets, they are: A small, affordable action that anyone can take to discover and develop ideas. Here is a more complete explanation in an interview with Andrew […]
Malcolm Gladwell retells the story of the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center in the latest issue of the New Yorker (it’s readable behind a paywall here). The story of PARC is fascinating, and Gladwell provides a nice twist to it. One of the main threads in the story concerns their invention of the laser printer. […]
Innovation is the process of idea management. One of the critical steps to successful innovation is getting your idea to spread. Hugh MacLeod’s outstanding new book Evil Plans has a lot about how to get your ideas to spread more effectively. One of his tenets is that we should create random acts of traction. There […]
I watched The Future is Unwritten again this weekend, the documentary about Joe Strummer by Julien Temple. The Clash were my absolute favourite band for a long time, and I’ve always thought highly of Strummer. The movie gives a pretty balanced view of his life, exploring his faults as well as his strengths. But the […]
There’s been a lot of buzz about Steven Johnson’s book Where Good Ideas Come From. An article in Foreign Policy by Stephen Walt addresses the opposite question: Where Do Bad Ideas Come From? He is talking about bad ideas in foreign policy, such as the domino effect, which have been used to justify policy but […]
Social influence is important to innovation. One of the critical steps in innovating is getting our great new ideas to spread – and this is often an issue of social influence. Here is an excellent short talk from network researcher Sinan Aral about how to measure social influence: Sinan Aral: Social Contagion from PopTech on […]
