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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Big Think’s contributors offer expert analysis of the big ideas behind the news.
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Innovation and Creativity for the Darwinian CEO
Have you ever had an innovative business idea and wondered whether Google would be interested? Usually, this doesn't go much further than a simple blog entry or a comment left on someone else's blog. However, one 25-year-old from Idaho decided to go several steps further, so convinced was he that ...
Liz Ryan of Business Week explains that it is important to keep your team innovative, even when you're ixnay-ing their creative ideas on a regular basis. For managers, it means encouraging the free flow of ideas, while simultaneously finding ways to squelch the least practical ones in as ...
Do you ever see corporations doing innovative things they shouldn't, theoretically, be doing? Usually, it starts with an employee in the front ranks, changing the way he or she interacts with customers. From there, the practice can spread throughout the organization. Customers and partners ...
The now-infamous leaked Starbucks memo from Chairman Howard Schultz, in which he deplored the growing commoditization of the Starbucks brand, is continuing to generate commentary on the official Starbucks Gossip blog. (The latest post, linking to TIME Magazine's take on the Starbucks memo, has ...
As New Scientist Tech points out, it will soon be possible to "evolve" colonies of robots that are able to think, act and even pass on their robotic DNA to future generations: "Robots that artificially evolve ways to communicate with one another have been demonstrated ...
Is it just me, or does this sound like the creation of the Pre-Crime Unit from the movie Minority Report? The Rutgers newspaper reports that the Department of Homeland Security is working with Rutgers University to develop a computer program that can monitor suspicious social networks and ...
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 ...