23 Quotes by John Seely Brown

The need for innovation – the lifeblood of business – is widely recognized, and imagination and play are key ingredients for making it happen.

The locus of corporate innovations has been product development. But in times of rapid and unpredictable change, the creation of individual products becomes less important than the creation of a general organizational aptitude for innovation.

The most important invention that will come out of the corporate research lab in the future will be the corporation itself.

People need to know more than what a piece of information means. They also need to know how the information matters.

For me, the concept of design is more than object-oriented; it encompasses the design of processes, systems and institutions as well. Increasingly, we need to think about designing the types of institutions we need to get things done in this rapidly accelerating world.

Our research into emerging creation spaces has identified three elements that combine to set in motion the increasing-returns dynamics that make these spaces successful: participants, interactions, and environments.

It’s been said that if NASA wanted to go to the moon again, it would have to start from scratch, having lost not the data, but the human expertise that took it there the last time.

Rather than focusing on attracting and retaining talent, as they do today, institutional leaders must shift their attention to accessing and developing talent.

We are working on creating self-describing, self-organizing, self-diagnosing and self-repairing networks.