The problem with solutions is that answers stop thinking, as Chuck Frey says in a good post today. When trying to solve a problem, often the best thing to do is to leave the question open for a while. This is tough, because most people have a natural tendency to want to solve the problem […]

Too often people think about things happening to them, rather than thinking about how they make things happen. Agency is important, and we must never forget that we have the capacity to act. You can see the results people can have in the current events in Tunisia and Egypt. Agency is a critical part of […]

One of the tricky parts of doing social science is that a lot of the things that we try to study are not actually real. Or, as Steve Horwitz puts it in an interesting post trying to define Austrian Economics: The “facts” of the social sciences are what people believe and think. This has some […]

One of the critical parts of the innovation process is getting our great ideas to spread. Diffusion is often the stumbling block for innovative new ideas. There is a section towards the end of Making Ideas Happen by Scott Belsky that provides some interesting insights into how to attack this problem. Belsky describes a storytelling […]

Lots of new ideas fail. Many of them are great ideas, and they’ve been proven to solve an important problem, yet they still fail. Why? Because in addition to having a great idea, and making it work, if we are innovating we also have to get the idea to spread. Part of the problem is […]