In a peer network, no one is officially in charge. It doesn't have a command hierarchy. It doesn't have a boss. So, all the decisions are somehow made collectively. The control of the system is in the hands of everyone who is a part of it.

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

One of the founding moments of public health in the 19th century effectively poisoned the water supply of London much more effectively than any modern day bioterrorist could have ever dreamed of doing.

When it's a sharing and improvisational meeting, where you're riffing off other people's ideas, that actually can be productive.

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

Calculus, the electrical battery, the telephone, the steam engine, the radio - all these groundbreaking innovations were hit upon by multiple inventors working in parallel with no knowledge of one another.

Silicon-based life may be impossible for one other reason: silicon bonds readily dissolve in water.