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.
Every now and then we hear about people who are doing extraordinary things. It could be a world leader saving millions of lives, a businessperson revolutionizing an industry, or even the person down the street helping to make life much better for underserved people in the community. When we hear of ...
It used to be that any change in an organization would flow from the top down—from the executives to the front line workers. But today, especially when it comes to the consumerization of IT, the change process is quite different. What we have been seeing in the past few years is a “bottom-up ...
The Communication Age is here, and it’s time we harness it. Why? Because informing is a one-way conversation between you and your employees, customers, or other stakeholders. And let’s face it…you can send somebody a new policy, a new training manual, a new brochure, or even an email and not know ...
When you think of social media, the first thing that comes to mind is probably Facebook. That’s no surprise considering that as of April 2013, Facebook had 1.06 billion monthly active users, 680 million mobile users, more than 50 million pages, and 10 million apps[1]. Numbers like that ...
Today’s smart phones are much more than phones—they are powerful, networked multimedia computers, and over the next 10 years they’ll get far more advanced. As a result, mobility is transforming every business process, including how we sell, communicate, collaborate, train, and educate. Following ...
On a global level, we are adding connected intelligence to both machines and objects using chips, micro sensors, and both wired and wireless networks to create a rapidly growing “Internet of things” sharing real-time data, performing diagnostics, and even making remote repairs. Many jobs will be ...
It used to be that the business landscape was a man’s world. Times are changing! Today, women are wielding more and more power on both sides of the business transaction. First, let’s look at some facts from the consumer side. In family purchases that involve two adults (a woman and a man) women ...
We are currently in the midst of one the biggest software and hardware revolutions we’ve ever witnessed. With processing power, storage, and bandwidth increasing exponentially, smart phones and smart tablets are becoming our main personal computer. As a result, customers, employees, and other ...
We live in an amazing era of technology-driven transformation that’s redefining how we sell, market, communicate, collaborate, innovate, train, and educate—all in an amazingly short period of time. With that said, though, we don’t want to lose sight of the fact that the future is a human future ...
In recent years, text messaging has become a major part of how we communicate. Recent surveys find that 60% of people worldwide are active texters, with over 193,000 text messages sent every second. In fact, texting is the number one most used data service in the world. So if you’re not using text ...
We are no longer in a period of rapid change! We have now entered a unique period of time, unlike anything any of us have ever seen, that can best be described as transformation. Three digital accelerators have been driving the transition from change to transformation for many years, but due to ...
We are no longer in a period of rapid change. We have now entered an amazing inflection point where true transformation happens. For example, we changed how we listened to music when we went from one album per large spinning disk to one album per smaller spinning disc, the CD. When we put all our ...
As technology continues to impact our lives, workers in today’s ever-changing labor market need to be prepared with skills to adapt and succeed in the workplace. Job opportunities in technology are growing up to three times faster than other career fields in the U.S.[1] Long gone are the days of a ...
What if you could deliver your product to your customer the moment it was manufactured? What if your customers could manufacture a replacement part whenever they need one? What if doctors could manufacture a body part, personalized for the individual patient, in the hospital at a moment’s notice ...
In my latest New York Times best seller Flash Foresight , I share seven principles that can make invisible opportunities visible. Becoming anticipatory both personally and organizationally is crucial. Agility has been a reasonable survival strategy during times of rapid change, like the 1980s ...