If you look at where innovation - defined as ideas, not as commercial product - tends to live, the university system is remarkably innovative.

Chance favors the connected mind.

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

Those that regularly come into contact with people having diverse interests and viewpoints are more likely to come up with innovative ideas.

The patterns are simple, but followed together, they make for a whole that is wiser than the sum of its parts. Go for a walk; cultivate hunches; write everything down, but keep your folders messy; embrace serendipity; make generative mistakes; take on multiple hobbies; frequent coffeehouses and other liquid networks; follow the links; let others build on your ideas; borrow, recycle; reinvent. Build a tangled bank.

This is not the wisdom of the crowd, but the wisdom of someone in the crowd. It’s not that the network itself is smart; it’s that the individuals get smarter because they’re connected to the network.

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.