John Seely Brown specializes in organizational studies and the management of radical innovation. With multiple publications, honorary degrees, and educational achievements under his belt; here is a look at some of the best John Seely Brown quotes to keep you motivated.
“Core participants tend to focus on transactions rather than investing in the long-term effort to build sustainable, trust-based relationships on the edge.”
“Even when they are successful in tapping into a more diverse set of knowledge flows, companies tend to concentrate on flows involving transfers of existing knowledge rather than creation of new knowledge.”
“For me, the concept of design is more than object-oriented; it encompasses the design of processes, systems and institutions as well. Increasingly, we need to think about designing the types of institutions we need to get things done in this rapidly accelerating world.”
“If you can design the physical space, the social space, and the information space together to enhance collaborative learning, then that whole milieu turns into a learning technology.”
“In pull platforms, the modules are designed to be loosely coupled, with interfaces that help users to understand what the module contains and how it can be accessed.”
“Institutions designed for push cannot easily accommodate pull.”
W/ @jseelybrown & @gilliantett talking about #TheSiloEffect pic.twitter.com/itARzgzpNb
— Susan Marquis (@susanlmarquis) October 28, 2015
“It’s been said that if NASA wanted to go to the moon again, it would have to start from scratch, having lost not the data, but the human expertise that took it there the last time.”
“It’s never enough to just tell people about some new insight. Rather, you have to get them to experience it a way that evokes its power and possibility.”
“No one will be able to effectively participate in relevant knowledge flows without possessing useful knowledge stocks of their own.”
“Our research into emerging creation spaces has identified three elements that combine to set in motion the increasing-returns dynamics that make these spaces successful: participants, interactions, and environments.”
“Passion in this context refers to a sustained and deep commitment to achieving our full potential and greater capacity for self-expression in a domain that engages us on a personal level.”
“People need to know more than what a piece of information means. They also need to know how the information matters.”
“People who reach out to connect with others to simply take knowledge will find that these interactions quickly dry up as others begin to realize they have little to gain from these connections.”
Innovation is hard but institutional innovation is really hard! @jseelybrown #AACSBdeans #owenlife pic.twitter.com/ybJO1YGcBD
— M Eric Johnson (@DeanEricJohnson) February 1, 2016
“Practice provides the rails on which knowledge flows.”
“Pull platforms make it easier to assemble participants and resources on an ad hoc basis to problem-solve unforeseen issues or situations.”
“Rather than focusing on attracting and retaining talent, as they do today, institutional leaders must shift their attention to accessing and developing talent.”
“Rather than molding individuals to fit the needs of the institution, institutions will be shaped to provide platforms to help individuals achieve their full potential by connecting with others and better addressing challenging performance needs.”
“The challenge for the institutional leader will be to quickly attract and mobilize passionate individuals wherever they reside within the institution (or even if they’re outside the institution).”
“The digital infrastructure makes outsourcing more feasible than ever, and this in turn makes it easier for small companies to access and use world-class capability to deliver more value to their markets and to respond more rapidly to unanticipated changes in markets.”
“The job of leadership today is not just to make money, it’s to make meaning.”
W my heroes @timoreilly @pahlkadot @jseelybrown ! pic.twitter.com/KVBHszi5PK
— Michael Fertik (@michaelfertik) July 16, 2015
“The locus of corporate innovations has been product development. But in times of rapid and unpredictable change, the creation of individual products becomes less important than the creation of a general organizational aptitude for innovation.”
“The most important invention that will come out of the corporate research lab in the future will be the corporation itself.”
“The need for innovation – the lifeblood of business – is widely recognized, and imagination and play are key ingredients for making it happen.”
“The success of creation spaces can be traced back to careful design at the outset by a small group of people who were very thoughtful about the conditions required to foster or “scaffold” scalable collaboration, learning, and performance improvement.”
“The technologies that will be most successful will resonate with human behaviour instead of working against it. In fact, to solve the problems of delivering and assimilating new technology into the workplace, we must look to the way humans act and react.”
“We are working on creating self-describing, self-organizing, self-diagnosing and self-repairing networks.”
“When people chase what they love, they will inevitably seek out and immerse themselves in knowledge flows, drinking deeply from new creative wells even as they contribute their own experiences and insights along the way.”
John Seely Brown appears in this Big Thinkers Series and discusses the merging of digital culture and education.
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