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.
Browse videos featuring experts across a wide range of disciplines, from personal health to business leadership to neuroscience.
Big Think’s contributors offer expert analysis of the big ideas behind the news.
Big Think’s Edge learning platform for career mentorship and professional development provides engaging and actionable courses delivered by the people who are shaping our future.
Innovation and Creativity for the Darwinian CEO
Walter Derzko of the Smart Economy blog explains that becoming an instant expert within any field is simply a matter of learning how to deal with the information overload, while at the same time, creating an "issues dashboard" that will enable you to understand the context behind the idea. Below ...
In the weekend edition of the Wall Street Journal (sub req), Robert Litan, Vice-President of the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation in Kansas City, weighed in with an op-ed piece on why innovators matter most: "Their enterprises are the ones which create the jobs and industries of the future -- as ...
Mix together tabloid sensationalism in the world's largest media market; the academic theory that any two people in the U.S. are linked together by, at most, six degrees of separation; and the current fascination with genealogical research powered by the Internet, and you get something like this ...
The European Innovation Scorecard, which measures the relative innovation performance of EU member nations vis-a-vis the U.S. and Japan, shows once again that the Nordic countries (Sweden, Finland, Denmark) are at the top of the innovation rankings, while the newest member states of Europe (e.g ...
A picture, as they say, is worth a thousand words. This was the cover of the February 17 issue of The Economist: "The end of the cash era." With electronic payments and various forms of digital money on the rise, the era of coins and bills could be nearing an end: "Cash, after millennia as one of ...
Over at the USACM Technology Policy Weblog, there's a comprehensive summary of the first-ever public meeting of the Measuring Innovation in the 21st Century Economy advisory committee. This committee, which includes a mix of CEOs and academics, was formed in December by Commerce Secretary Carlos ...
In the current issue of New York Magazine, Kurt Andersen describes the changing dynamics of the media business, with a focus on how established media outlets like the New York Times and Washington Post are dealing with the explosion in popularity of online video. Should these mainstream media ...
The past two weeks have been rough for JetBlue. Just before Valentine's Day, the snow and ice that swept through the Northeast paralyzed the airline company's operations in New York, leaving customers stranded on planes for up to 10 hours at a time. From clips that I watched on the local news ...
If you think Google's "20% Time" is a great idea for encouraging innovation and creativity, check out what IBM is doing. According to Computerworld, IBM's offices in the U.S. have instituted "ThinkFridays" as a way of stimulating out-of-the-box thinking: "On January 1, IBM rolled out companywide ...
One of the hottest IPOs of 2006 was Heelys, the company that started a nationwide fad of skating around in shoes with wheels in them. (If you have the misfortune of living near a suburban mall, you can't help but notice little tykes whizzing past you every few minutes on their Heelys). Anyway, how ...
Fans of the now-deceased Business Innovation Insider may remember that I posted about a live simulcast of the Metropolitan Opera in Times Square last fall. It was all part of a broader strategy by the Met to bring opera to the masses (people in Times Square were actually stopping and looking up ...
Over at the IdeaPort blog, Roger Dennis presents a PG-13 rated list of ten reasons why innovation is like tantric sex: 1. You can read lots about it, but there’s no substitute for doing it. 2. Lots of people talk about it, but few people know actually know how it works. 3. You can ...
One of the free online features of today's Wall Street Journal is a trailer for Bollywood's version of the Rocky Balboa story. (Look carefully - that's not Sylvester Stallone, that's some Indian actor who looks remarkably like him) The Indian film industry is innovative and thriving - why did it ...
If you're looking for a quick Google fix this week, Information Week is dealing. Start off by learning more about Larry Page's pet innovation projects. Apparently, the Google co-founder thinks there is a real market in under-developed parts of the world for ultralight planes capable of traveling ...
This weekend's New York Times Magazine featured a great cover story on Toyota, which explained how the Japanese company has become the acknowledged leader in the global automobile industry. At a time when Ford and GM are downsizing and rightsizing, the incredible Toyota engineering team continues ...