At the Women on Wall Street conference last night, Steven Berlin Johnson gave a keynote on how innovation happens. He has studied the history of breakthrough innovations and found a pattern: They are created not by “Eureka!” moments, but slow hunches that incubate, sometimes for decades, with diverse people collaborating to make unintended consequences. Here [...]

Dennis Crowley spoke at NYU Stern School of Business today about how he went from being laid off in 2001 to CEO of Foursquare. About 400 people were gathered outside the auditorium, because the session before Crowley’s was running late. The crowd was getting very loud. There were business school students and NYU alums, and [...]

I am looking for publishing app. case studies for Premedia Spectrum (1/18-1/21, in Naples, FL http://bit.ly/ddhnih) e-mail me at ksandler1@gmail.com, subject: Tablet Story. Premedia Spectrum is a conference that brought together two leading industry conferences: the GAA Premedia Conference and IDEAlliance Spectrum. GAA is the Gravure Association of America, a trade association for gravure printing. [...]

Stephen P. Anderson gave a great talk tonight to the NY Chapter of the Interaction Design Association (IxDA). He spoke about using psychology to achieve great user interface and design. He showed a ton of examples of great design, analyzed why it worked, then spoke about the psychology behind it. He sells a card deck [...]

Foursquare Co-Founder Naveen Selvadurai spoke at Publishing Point meetup about developing fun (+ getting > 2 million users in 17 months). Questions he asked: How do we do better at living at a city? They created Foursquare so you could get info. from friends about cool places, find things to do in your city and [...]

Fred Brooks, computer industry rockstar, regaled 200 geek disciples at Etsy last night with stories about why team design doesn’t work. Brooks wrote a classic book called The Mythical Man-Month about how putting more engineers on a project slows it down paradoxically. In his new book, The Design of Design: Essays from a Computer Scientist, [...]

Nice summary of biz innovators and their success and failures: http://bit.ly/7wSkle. Excerpts below. I want to know what business stories gave you your greatest innovation lesson. “1. Think of things that never were and ask ‘why not?”: Bobby Kennedy’s famous motto is an apt description for the beginning of business innovation. Great ideas can strike [...]

At TEDxNY, we discussed William McDonough’s talk on cradle to cradle design. Hope you can join us next week – see http://tedxnewyork.blogspot.com/. The new Grey offices are amazing – open workspaces designed for collaboration – looks like an industrial-designed coffee bar. They reviewed this old talk in light of the COP15 (2009 United Nations Climate [...]

Fortune Brainstorm Tech blog: innovation doesn’t have to be risky. Excerpts below. Full post at http://bit.ly/59o6hT. I want to know: Are you focusing on innovation or survival? “Many companies remain shell-shocked from the past 18 months of economic disaster. As such, innovation – despite its potential rewards – is not exactly in fashion right now. [...]

Matthew May, Chief Strategist for MBox Design on 4 traps in the way of a culture of constant innovation. Excerpts below. Full post at http://bit.ly/4In4If. I want to know: What traps have you seen? “1. Swinging for fences. In sports we worship the game-clinching grand slam home run, the three-point field goal at the buzzer, [...]