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The Elusive Big Idea. Top row from left: Hulton Archive/Getty Images, Archives of the California Institute of Technology, Hulton Archive/Getty Images, Neal Boenzi/The New York Times. Bottom row from left: Alfred Eisenstaedt/Time & Life Pictures — Getty Images, Associated Press, Tim Gidal/Picture Post — Getty Images, Bernard Gotfryd/Getty Images Top row from left: Marie Curie, Albert Einstein, George Washington Carver and Betty Friedan. Bottom row from left: Charles R. Drew, Germaine Greer, John Maynard Keynes and Marshall McLuhan. THE July/August issue of The Atlantic trumpets the “14 Biggest Ideas of the Year.” Now exhale. They could penetrate the general culture and make celebrities out of thinkers — notably Albert Einstein, but also Reinhold Niebuhr, Daniel Bell, Betty Friedan, Carl Sagan and Stephen Jay Gould, to name a few.
If our ideas seem smaller nowadays, it’s not because we are dumber than our forebears but because we just don’t care as much about ideas as they did. The Secret of Innovation: The Best Ideas Are Small - Derek Thompson - Business. Kicking off a new special report on creativity and innovation at the personal, business, and government levels "Ideas just aren't what they used to be," Neal Gabler observed in a New York Times essay this summer about the end of ideas (which is, paradoxically, an idea).
Reviewing The Atlantic's annual ideas issue of 2011 -- a list that included The Players Own the Game, Wall Street: Same as it Ever Was, and The Rise of the Middle Class (Just Not Ours) -- Gabler decided that these headlines were too small to qualify as full-fledged ideas, especially when you stack them up against earth-shaking pronouncements like The Big Bang Theory and The End of History. "They are more on the order of observations," he noted dryly. Whether you agree with Gabler that we are living in "an increasingly post-idea world" comes down to how you define that key word.
Gabler has a tall height requirement for ideas: Must be this big to ride with Einstein and Fukuyama. This is how it's always been. Charles Leadbeater on innovation. Ideas-Innovation.
The Secret of Innovation: The Best Ideas Are Small - Derek Thompson - Business.