The Best Articles in Innovation
The most useful articles and videos in Innovation from around the web, curated by thought leaders and our community.
Refind focuses on timeless pieces and updates the list whenever new, must-read articles or videos are discovered.
Top 5 Innovation Articles
At a glance: these are the articles that have been most read, shared, and saved in Innovation by Refind users in 2024 so far.
Videos
Watch a video to get a quick overview.
How to come up with good business ideas
This was recorded on Monday, February 7th for Cohort #3 of The Minimalist Entrepreneur Course.You can learn more about the book this content is based on here...
8 Sustainability ideas that will change the world
Diving into some of the most innovative ideas across retail, city planning, policy, technology and construction. Ideas that will truly change the way we thin...
How To Find MILLION DOLLAR Business Ideas That WORK
I'm joined by Noah Kagan, CEO of AppSumo. We talk about how to build products people love, how he lost $1M for not listening to customers, how to find the be...
Building Confidence In Yourself and Your Ideas
One trait that many great founders share is conviction. In this episode of Dalton & Michael, we’ll talk about finding confidence in what you're building, the...
Rasmus Ankersen: How to outthink your competition
Does success come from luck or skill, and how do you tell the difference? One way to find an answer: think like a pro gambler does, says football executive Rasmus Ankersen. Using sports analytics to…
What is ...?
New to Innovation? These articles make an excellent introduction.
The Blockchain Economy: A beginner’s guide to institutional cryptoeconomics
Chris Berg, Sinclair Davidson and Jason Potts are from the RMIT Blockchain Innovation Hub, the world’s first social science research centre…
What Is Disruptive Innovation?
Twenty years after the introduction of the theory, we revisit what it does—and doesn’t—explain.
How to ...?
How to build the city of the future, according to Ikea’s innovation lab
‘The Ideal City’ collects the most successful urban ideas from around the world, to serve as a sort of cookbook of best practices for city leaders.
Trending
These links are currently making the rounds in Innovation on Refind.
Why Did Supersonic Airliners Fail?
Progress in aviation has traditionally been associated with speed. Following the Wright Brothers’ flight in 1903, aircraft speeds steadily increased each decade, and increasing aircraft speeds was one…
Can we learn about innovation from patent data?
The final post of Patent Data Week!
Is Your Company’s Data Ready for Generative AI?
While CDOs and data leaders are excited about generative AI, they have much work to do to get ready for it. A recent survey of 334 CDOs and data leaders — and a series of interviews with these…
Product Innovation: Stop Inventing Cool Sh*t Your Customers Don’t Want!
Why do so many innovations fail? We know from research and experience that more innovations and startups fail from a lack of customers than a failure of the product or technology. In other words, too…
Short Articles
Short on time? Check out these useful short articles in Innovation—all under 10 minutes.
The best way to unlock potential? Don’t focus on raw talent
By all accounts, Philipp Meyer is a talented writer. He has won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. His novels have been compared to the pantheon of Faulkner,…
«Meyer’s story is a reminder that our cultural obsession with raw talent is misguided. To truly unlock potential — either your own or that of the people you lead and teach — you must refine your shortcomings, too.»
Young children trounce large language models in a simple problem-solving task
Large language models like ChatGPT are immensely powerful — the first artificial intelligences to produce truly human-like content. They are already being used to provide customer service, write…
«It’s a wonderful irony: When AIs become more childlike, that’s when their abilities might truly explode, with world-changing ramifications.»
Clarify Your Thinking by Drawing Concept Maps
Drawings aren’t just for conveying meaning; the act of drawing itself helps you understand. And few drawings are more helpful for understanding complex ideas than concept maps. However, concept…
246. The People We Take For Granted
In which we discuss car parts, pyramids, pop stars, pedestals and how your boss will take for granted the things you do. Frankly, it's a little bit surprising.
How to avoid “death by LLM”
When Stack Overflow’s traffic apparently went into rapid decline this year, Elon Musk reacted on X with an epitaph: “Death by LLM.” (LLM stands for “large language model.”) His message initially sent…
«Create an AI roadmap now, not tomorrow»
Long Articles
These are some of the most-read long-form articles in Innovation.
How Lego builds a new Lego set
Exclusive: the $80 Lego Ideas Polaroid OneStep — and how it was made.
New talk: Making Hard Things Easy
A few weeks ago I gave a keynote at Strange Loop called Making Hard Things Easy. It’s about why I think some things are hard to learn and ideas for how we can make them easier. Here’s the video, as…
“There’s Nothing Mystical About the Idea that Ideas Change History”
An interview with Steven Pinker.
How the world’s best companies build unbeatable focus
Shared by 368, including Rand Fishkin
«One business we worked with took 30 minutes to implement A/B testing software; another took six months. That’s 8,760 times slower.»
Innovation Doesn’t Have to Be Disruptive
For the past 20 years “disruption” has been a battle cry in business. Not surprisingly, many have come to see it as a near-synonym for innovation. But the obsession with disruption obscures an…
Thought Leaders
We monitor hundreds of thought leaders, influencers, and newsletters in Innovation, including:
What is Refind?
Every day Refind picks the most relevant links from around the web for you. Picking only a handful of links means focusing on what’s relevant and useful.
How does Refind curate?
It’s a mix of human and algorithmic curation, following a number of steps:
- We monitor 10k+ sources and 1k+ thought leaders on hundreds of topics—publications, blogs, news sites, newsletters, Substack, Medium, Twitter, etc.
- In addition, our users save links from around the web using our Save buttons and our extensions.
- Our algorithm processes 100k+ new links every day and uses external signals to find the most relevant ones, focusing on timeless pieces.
- Our community of active users gets the most relevant links every day, tailored to their interests. They provide feedback via implicit and explicit signals: open, read, listen, share, mark as read, read later, «More/less like this», etc.
- Our algorithm uses these internal signals to refine the selection.
- In addition, we have expert curators who manually curate niche topics.
The result: lists of the best and most useful articles on hundreds of topics.
How does Refind detect «timeless» pieces?
We focus on pieces with long shelf-lives—not news. We determine «timelessness» via a number of metrics, for example, the consumption pattern of links over time.
How many sources does Refind monitor?
We monitor 10k+ content sources on hundreds of topics—publications, blogs, news sites, newsletters, Substack, Medium, Twitter, etc.
Who are the thought leaders in Innovation?
We follow dozens of thought leaders in Innovation, including Mariana Mazzucato, Benedict Evans, Alf Rehn, Brian Solis, steve blank.
Missing a thought leader? Submit them here
Can I submit a link?
Indirectly, by using Refind and saving links from outside (e.g., via our extensions).
How can I report a problem?
When you’re logged-in, you can flag any link via the «More» (...) menu. You can also report problems via email to hello@refind.com
Who uses Refind?
450k+ smart people start their day with Refind. To learn something new. To get inspired. To move forward. Our apps have a 4.9/5 rating.
Is Refind free?
Yes, it’s free!
How can I sign up?
Head over to our homepage and sign up by email or with your Twitter or Google account.
Keep Learning
Learn something new, guided by experts. Deep Dives are carefully hand-curated series of time-tested articles and videos from around the web.
Get the big picture on your favorite topics.