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It may not be possible to 'win the future,' in President Obama's words, but if we're going to encourage more innovation, it's not enough for us to just dig in and work harder. We also need to encourage surprise and serendipity. We need to play each other's instruments.

Steven Johnson

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Steven Johnson
Age: 56
Born: 1968
Born: June 6
Author
Journalist
Writer
Washington
District of Columbia
Steven Berlin Johnson
Need
Possible
Enough
Winning
Serendipity
Needs
Future
Encourage
Going
Words
Innovation
Work
President
Instruments
Also
Surprise
May
Obama
Play
Harder

More quotes by Steven Johnson

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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 in a sense has gotten bigger.
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I love those stretches where I've just been a writer - when I haven't been doing Internet start-ups - where I pretty much eliminate meetings from my life.
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Chance favors the connected mind.
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If you look at where innovation - defined as ideas, not as commercial product - tends to live, the university system is remarkably innovative.
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We are strangely biased, as individuals and media institutions, to focus on big sudden changes, whether good or bad - amazing breakthroughs, such as a new gadget that gets released, or catastrophic failures, like a plane crash.
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If you look at history, innovation doesn't come just from giving people incentives it comes from creating environments where their ideas can connect.
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When you don't have to ask for permission innovation thrives.
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The trick to having good ideas is not to sit around in glorious isolation and try to think big thoughts. The trick is to get more parts on the table.
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We need to play each others instruments.
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Some great minds become great by turning the rubble of an exploded paradigm into something consistent and meaningful. Others become great by laying the gunpowder, grain by grain. Every important revolution needs both kinds of minds to complete itself.
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Good ideas may not want to be free, but they do want to connect, fuse, recombine. They want to reinvent themselves by crossing conceptual borders. They want to complete each other as much as they want to compete
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Silicon-based life may be impossible for one other reason: silicon bonds readily dissolve in water.
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Most of the time, criticism that takes pop culture seriously involves performing some kind of symbolic analysis, decoding the work to demonstrate the way it represents some other aspect of society.
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Calculus, the electrical battery, the telephone, the steam engine, the radio - all these groundbreaking innovations were hit upon by multiple inventors working in parallel with no knowledge of one another.
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We are often better served by connecting ideas than we are by protecting them.
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That strange new zone between medium and message. That zone we call the interface.
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I suspect millions of people from my generation probably have comparable stories to tell: if not of sports simulations then of Dungeons & Dragons, or the geopolitical strategy of games like Diplomacy, a kind of chess superimposed onto actual history.
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Being right keeps you in place, being wrong forces you to explore.
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What I'm saying is individuals have better ideas if they're connected to rich, diverse networks of other individuals. If you put yourself in an environment with lots of different perspectives, you yourself are going to have better, sharper, more original ideas. It's not that the network is smart.
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Nothing really says ... interactivity - which was so exciting and captures the real, the Web Zeitgeist of 1995 - than 'Click here for a picture of my dog.'
Steven Johnson