I wonder what do you think of Antifragility notion by Taleb and where would it fit. The central point is that "quantity matters" and one shall divide the investment into as many motivated research teams, startups or ideas as possible - to hit the "blackswan" rare but extremely beneficial intervention. For example M-Pesa was a once in a decade project - DFID gave a 1m pound grant to Vodafone and they matched it. And thus scaled a simple idea that created mobile banking based on SMS- the only universal mobile app besides calling. Now a th... (read more)
While the Greeks did have some steam engines it's not clear that they had the requirements for using steam engines in a commercially viable way. The commercially-viable steam engines we have seen needed high quality brass that wasn't available before 1700.
I wonder what do you think of Antifragility notion by Taleb and where would it fit. The central point is that "quantity matters" and one shall divide the investment into as many motivated research teams, startups or ideas as possible - to hit the "blackswan" rare but extremely beneficial intervention. For example M-Pesa was a once in a decade project - DFID gave a 1m pound grant to Vodafone and they matched it. And thus scaled a simple idea that created mobile banking based on SMS- the only universal mobile app besides calling. Now a th... (read more)