From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
My favourite question when evaluating a startup idea is, 'Is this from the future?' I'm not interested in your ideas about the future; I want to understand why you are living in it today. Why are you living in a different future right now than other people are?
Hip hop, in my view, stands at the vanguard of cultural and technological adoption, consistently ahead in both marketing and technological innovations. If you aim to create cutting-edge businesses, there's a lot to learn from these fields, which consistently remain at the forefront.
MIT was one of the places where molecular biology was born, and I could participate in this enterprise with my own hands.
You cannot expend more energy than you can consume. That's a fundamental law of physics. If you do, you starve, you die, and you remove yourself from the gene pool. Biological systems have therefore been under enormous selective pressure to develop highly efficient intelligence.
I wanted passersby to wonder, 'Have you seen that? What's going on there?' I understood that excellent food would ensure repeat customers, but initially, my primary goal was simply to astonish and differentiate myself radically enough to draw attention.
Here was Steve Jobs and Bill Gates- two young guys, under the age of 30, talking about their noble cause of empowering knowledge workers with tools for the mind, making them incredibly productive, and helping them to change the way things were done in our world; creating entirely new industries in the process.
You cannot get a breakthrough, you cannot get a change nor a transformation unless you are willing to take that risk by stepping into the unknown. If getting the possibility requires going through uncertainty, they are two sides of the same coin.
The old adage 'hedge funds are bought, not sold', will likely need to be revisited. Likewise, firms will be forced to adapt and evolve their infrastructures to process and pursue inbound inquiries from prospective investors.
What is the value of asking the right question to prompt the right answer? It would be difficult to find a sector that design and/or design thinking cannot impact.
Design is the great 're-configurer' of problems for business… for example design takes an engineering solution for transmitting signals called a phone and reconfigures it into a hyper complex problem of glass and metal shapes, etc.
If you really want innovation, you have to say 'no' a lot of times to what's incremental. Saying 'no' reinforces that the small stuff isn't enough.
The fear of loss is real because it is based on perceptions of reality. It cannot be wished away by education. The idea that education can reduce resistance to innovation is often informed by the misguided view that people oppose new technologies because of ignorance. This is not the case.