This much we all know. When it comes to stories of gadget proliferation, the mobile revolution is the mother of them all.

if anything is more naïve than an unquestioning belief in the transformative power of entrepreneurs, it is an unquestioning belief in the power of national governments, international organizations, and multinational corporations to address complex twenty-first-century challenges.

In the case of fears over large-scale unemployment, the real risk to the future is the understandable tendency to react to adversity by hanging on to the past rather than seizing the opportunities that the underlying causes of adversity create.

(iii) Previously closed networks of production and knowledge are now open and accessible to creative and determined people everywhere. (iv) Open networks of production and communication are, in turn, enabling globally distributed collaboration and innovation on a massive, unprecedented scale.

The empty hand is the gap between idea and reality, between motion and action. It is the cognitive space for the truly unexpected. It is the habit and practice of creative preparedness. It is the boundary between order and adaptability. And, when put into use, and yet at the same time kept empty, it is entrepreneurship.

True economic novelty is the equivalent of a new ingredient, one never used before; new economic combinations are equivalent to new recipes.

everyday practice of providing lower-level personnel both the discretion and the information they need to improvise in response to particular situations.

“The behavior of the individual social insect evolved with reference to what it contributes to the community, whereas the genetic fitness of a human being depends on how well it can individually use the society. We have become insect-like only by extreme contractual arrangements.”

Production recipes are the how of economic life—the repeatable steps that allow individuals or, far more often, groups of people, to turn raw materials into useful products. Most production recipes, like most culinary recipes, are unwritten. Most managers, like most cooks, are not hugely inventive. The creation of new forms of economic activity, li