Top 16 Quotes & Sayings by John Seely Brown

Practice provides the rails on which knowledge flows.

Processes don't do work, people do

It's been said that if NASA wanted to go to the moon again, it would have to start from scratch, having lost not the data, but the human expertise that took it there the last time.

The need for innovation – the lifeblood of business – is widely recognized, and imagination and play are key ingredients for making it happen.

It's never enough to just tell people about some new insight. Rather, you have to get them to experience it a way that evokes its power and possibility. Instead of pouring knowledge into people's heads, you need to help them grind anew set of eyeglasses so they can see the world in a new way.

The most important invention that will come out of the corporate research lab in the future will be the corporation itself.

Conversation is a catalyst for innovation

For me, the concept of design is more than object-oriented; it encompasses the design of processes, systems and institutions as well. Increasingly, we need to think about designing the types of institutions we need to get things done in this rapidly accelerating world.

If you can design the physical space, the social space, and the information space together to enhance collaborative learning, then that whole milieu turns into a learning technology.

The harder you fight to hold on to specific assumptions, the more likely there's gold in letting go of them.

The locus of corporate innovations has been product development. But in times of rapid and unpredictable change, the creation of individual products becomes less important than the creation of a general organizational aptitude for innovation.

The job of leadership today is not just to make money, it's to make meaning.

We are working on creating self-describing, self-organizing, self-diagnosing and self-repairing networks.

People need to know more than what a piece of information means. They also need to know how the information matters.

The technologies that will be most successful will resonate with human behaviour instead of working against it. In fact, to solve the problems of delivering and assimilating new technology into the workplace, we must look to the way humans act and react. In the last 20 years, US industry has invested more than $1 trillion in technology, but has realised little improvement in the efficiency of its knowledge workers ­ and virtually none in their effectiveness. If we could solve the problems of the assimilation of new technology, the potential would be enormous.

If I ain't learning, it ain't fun.