Great piece (h/t @auerswald) putting innovation, iteration, and education into context. My two favorite segments 1) “The ethos of the Internet is that everyone should have the freedom to connect, to innovate, to program, without asking permission” (something I have been communicating in my lectures for 3 years and now have a fancy quote for!) and 2) “In fact, it is now usually cheaper to just try something than to sit around and try to figure out whether to try something.” ( something I am now integrating into my class with Lean, Blank, Business Model Canvas, etc..) From the piece by Joichi Ito in the NYT:

Innovators are able to prototype a new product with 3-D printers and cheap laser cutters for nearly nothing. Even complex products can be manufactured with help from supply chain companies that are making their systems available online to anybody. Today we are seeing the emergence of a community of hardware hackers and designers very reminiscent of the developers who wrote the original open standards of the Internet. An explosion of grass-roots innovation in hardware is coming — freely designed and freely shared — as it did in software.What has been a wildly successful model for consumer Internet start-ups in Silicon Valley turns out to be an extremely good model for learning in a wide variety of fields and disciplines. The students at M.I.T.’s Media Lab experiment, create and iterate; they produce demos and prototypes, and share and collaborate with the rest of the world through the Internet and a distributed network of connections and relationships.

I don’t think education is about centralized instruction anymore; rather, it is the process establishing oneself as a node in a broad network of distributed creativity.

The entire piece is well worth reading. Some good thoughts in there.

via Joichi Ito – Innovating by the Seat of Our Pants – NYTimes.com.