It may not be possible to 'win the future,' in President Obama's words, but if we're going to encourage more innovation, it's not enough for us to just dig in and work harder. We also need to encourage surprise and serendipity. We need to play each other's instruments.

Most new movements start this way: hundreds or thousands of individuals and groups, working in different fields and different locations, start thinking about change using a common language, without necessarily recognizing those shared values. You just start following your own vector, propelled along by people in your immediate vicinity. And then one day, you look up and realize that all those individual trajectories have turned into a wave.

The problem is, there are definitely some genuinely lame things on television, and there's more at the bottom of the barrel, because the barrel in a sense has gotten bigger.

We are often better served by connecting ideas than we are by protecting them.

As much as we sometimes roll our eyes at the ivory-tower isolation of universities, they continue to serve as remarkable engines of innovation.

If you look at history, innovation doesn't come just from giving people incentives; it comes from creating environments where their ideas can connect.

Good ideas may not want to be free, but they do want to connect, fuse, recombine. They want to reinvent themselves by crossing conceptual borders. They want to complete each other as much as they want to compete