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Catching Elephant is a theme by Andy Taylor (slightly modified)

 

In Pavlovian terms, if a culture rewards unnecessary reinvention more than it honors wise reuse, the ambitious will follow suit.

Scott Berkun, on the dangers of “Not Invented Here” syndrome, in Stop Trying to Reinvent the Wheel

The finance sector enables wealth creation, but the innovations that make the economy grow over time come from elsewhere. The financial industry really ought to be seen, and treated, as a servant of the real economy. It’s when finance takes the lead and begins to drive economic activity, as it did during the Internet stock bubble of the late 1990s and the mortgage lending craziness of 2003-2007, that we get into big trouble.

Justin Fox, What Business Should Want Out of Financial Reform [via Kevin Drum]

We have all benefited from the extraordinary innovation delivered first by the independent software industry and more recently by the web services industry. In both cases, this innovation was a direct result of the ability to innovate without permission.

Brad Burnham, Software patents are the problem not the answer [via Stephen Johnson]

The core skill of innovators is error-recovery, not failure-avoidance.

Randy Nelson, dean of Pixar University, on a lesson from NASA’s hiring practices for the Apollo program — look for test pilots that failed and were able to recover, not pilots who never made a mistake — in Learning and Working in the Collaborative Age: A New Model for the Workplace (video, quote at ~3 minutes)