The Industries of the Future
by Alec Ross
(Published by Simon and Schuster Paperbacks, 2016)
Alec Ross brings a raft of credentials to the horizon he explores. Ever mindful that "innovation brings both promise and peril," the author makes it abundantly clear that every group will not benefit from inevitable change. He brackets his argument with sentences like this: "If you can imagine an advance, somebody is already working on how to develop and commercialize it."....
Where Good Ideas Come From: the Nature and History of Innovation
By Steven Johnson
(Published By Riverhead Books, 2010)
It's no surprise that Steven Johnson, author of several, dynamic classics in contemporary thinking, treats this elusive subject in an insightful, unsentimental way. You can hear echoes of principles found in another of his works -- Emergence -- about how critical mass and proximity alter the nature of interactions. Johnson challenges with authority romantic notions of breakthroughs as sudden events unique to the individual who articulates one of them at a certain moment in time...