Gladwell added the interesting example of Gore Associates, the maker of Gore-Tex fabric, which limits how many people work together in one building. “We put a hundred and fifty parking spaces in the lot,” the president, Bill Gore, said. “When people start parking on the grass, we know it’s time to build a new plant.”

Endo’s story is more than a wild anecdote. The twisted paths leading to great discoveries are the rule rather than the exception. And so are their revisionist histories: victors don’t just write history; they rewrite history.

DARPA’s principles—elevated autonomy and visibility; a focus on the best external rather than internal ideas—won’t apply the same way to every company (most companies are not faced with problems that might be solved by a giant nuclear suppository). But every organization can find opportunities to increase autonomy, visibility, and soft equity.

Nobel laureate Phil Anderson once captured the core idea underlying the answers to these questions with the phrase more is different: “The whole becomes not only more than but very different from the sum of its parts.”

organizations. We will identify the small changes in structure, rather than culture, that can transform a rigid team. Leaders spend so much time preaching innovation. But one desperate molecule can’t prevent ice from crystallizing around it as the temperature drops. Small changes in structure, however, can melt steel.

Although China achieved critical mass (#3), it failed to ignite. It never created phase separation (#1) and dynamic equilibrium (#2). Political battles, and the emperor’s own prejudices, would regularly override the conclusions of the early “scientists.” Seven years after Shen began work on a new astronomical system, for example, the emperor decide

The demise of Pan Am was a remarkable story, but not a unique one. Nearly every company led by a master P-type innovator like Trippe gets shocked. Some sudden change, whether from a regulatory agency or a new competitor, stops the music. The loonshot-franchise cycle stops working. The wheel turns one too many times, and suddenly there’s a fleet of

But just the existence of a loonshot nursery—phase separation (#1)—is not enough. Eurocentric histories describing the rise of modern science in Western Europe often overlook the importance of the regular exchange with the large empires (dynamic equilibrium, #2). Without the mathematics borrowed from Indian scholars and Islamic astronomers, there w

critical mass, has to do with commitment. If there is no money to pay for hiring good people or funding early-stage ideas and projects, a loonshot group will wither, no matter how well designed. To thrive, a loonshot group needs a chain reaction. A research lab that produces a successful drug, a hit product, or award-winning designs will attract to