We live in a time of information abundance, which far too many of us see as information overload. With the sum total of human knowledge, past and present, at our fingertips, we’re faced with a crisis of attention: which ideas should we engage with, and why? Big Think is an evolving roadmap to the best thinking on the planet — the ideas that can help you think flexibly and act decisively in a multivariate world.
A word about Big Ideas and Themes — The architecture of Big Think
Big ideas are lenses for envisioning the future. Every article and video on bigthink.com and on our learning platforms is based on an emerging “big idea” that is significant, widely relevant, and actionable. We’re sifting the noise for the questions and insights that have the power to change all of our lives, for decades to come. For example, reverse-engineering is a big idea in that the concept is increasingly useful across multiple disciplines, from education to nanotechnology.
Themes are the seven broad umbrellas under which we organize the hundreds of big ideas that populate Big Think. They include New World Order, Earth and Beyond, 21st Century Living, Going Mental, Extreme Biology, Power and Influence, and Inventing the Future.
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Innovation and Creativity for the Darwinian CEO
Every now and then, the Wall Street Journal features results from The Patent Board, which has developed more than 50 indicators that track global patent activity relating to companies' innovation, technology, and science strengths. Earlier in the week, the Wall Street Journal took a closer look ...
On Sunday night, CNBC aired the second part of its five-part Business of Innovation special: Revolution & Evolution. Episode Two of the series examines how some companies manage to innovate while others in their same industry struggle to learn the secrets to their success. In some cases ...
Today is American pi day. Using the American convention of representing today's date as 03.14.07, it's easy to see why mathematicians are so excited about today's date, which very much resembles a quick approximation of the value of pi, or 3.14159. (One can only imagine the lack of decorum that ...
Jeff De Cagna, chief strategist and founder of Principled Innovation LLC, is hosting the first-ever Innovation Bloggers Virtual Forum on April 26. The event will consist of two separate roundtable discussions with prominent innovation bloggers on the topic of business innovation. I'll be ...
In a review of the new book Founders at Work: Stories of Startups' Early Days, Guy Kawasaki highlights a few of the stories and anecdotes he found most interesting -- especially those that involved the interaction between start-up founders and deep-pocketed venture capitalists. If you have any ...
In order for the Indian IT sector to make the next step in its economic development, it must embrace the broader world of business innovation. That's the thesis of a new research report from Navi Radjou of Forrester Research, who analyzes how Indian IT providers must reinvent their innovation ...
Is this what Joseph Schumpeter had in mind when he coined the phrase "Creative Destruction"? Today, the Las Vegas Strip's first mass-market casino-hotel, Stardust, was imploded to make way for Boyd Gaming Corp.'s $4.4 billion megaresort Echelon: "Hundreds of people partied beneath tents and on ...
Videos and podcasts from the panel discussions at the SXSW 2007 event, which kicked off over the weekend, are now available on the SXSW 2007 site. The event takes place over nine days, primarily involving a lot of creative professionals from the music, video gaming and film industries, but there ...
As Dan Bobinski points out in an opinion piece for Management Issues, managers need to spend more time listening to their workers and encouraging them to be creative: "I can't tell you how many times I've walked into businesses and seen people - okay, the leadership - walking around with their ...
In a special feature on "dream jobs", an AT&T researcher based in New Jersey explains what the "inventive researcher" does all day. In addition to being given free reign to engage their inner curiosity and tinker with new solutions, these researchers are allowed to "stare off into space" for ...
At the upcoming Cebit technology event in Germany, Russia is officially advertising itself as the "Innovation Nation." It's basically an attempt by Russian government officials to highlight the nation's wealth of programmers, technologists and scientists and entice foreigners to invest directly ...
As Amy Chozick of the Wall Street Journal reports, Japan is turning into a hotbed of creativity, thanks to a nascent economic turnaround and a predilection for all things new and trendy: "Japan has long been a world trendsetter, launching icons like the Sony Walkman and Honda Civic and sparking ...
Ever wondered what would happen if every U.S. CEO really said what he or she thought, instead of saying what he or she thought shareholders and employees wanted to hear? Check out the comments of D.R. Horton CEO Donald Tomnitz, who stunned the audience at a recent Citigroup investor conference ...
Over the past week, the official TED Blog has provided great coverage of the goings-on at TED 2007 in California, which this year has the tagline of "Icons. Geniuses. Mavericks." The event has already received a torrent of publicity, from the likes of CBS News, Business Week and the New York ...
Apple has a long track record of introducing innovative new products, such as the iPod and the iPhone, to popular and critical acclaim. In a witty satire piece, The Onion suggests that the next step for Apple is to create the iLaunch, an innovative way of introducing innovative products ...