Since the late 1990s, technology markets have declined dramatically. Responding to the changing business climate, companies use strategies of open innovation: acquiring technologies from outside, marketing their technologies to other companies, and outsourcing manufacturing. But open innovation is not enough; it is mainly a way to run a business to its endgame. By itself, open innovation results in razor-thin profits from products that compete as commodities. Businesses also need a path to renewal. No one ever achieved a breakthrough with open innovation.

Our capacity for creating breakthroughs depends on a combination of science, imagination, and business; the next great waves of innovation will come from organizations that get this combination right. During periods of rapid economic growth, companies and investors focus on the short term and forget where breakthroughs...

Like so many children, as a youth I was mystified by this wonderful and exasperating thing called memory. In casual and relaxed situations it worked so smoothly that I hardly ever noticed it; in examinations it only occasionally performed well, to my surprise, but was more often associated with 'bad memory', the fearful area of forgetting. Since I spent much of my childhood in the country with animals, I began to realise that the misnamed 'dumb' creatures seemed to have extraordinary memories, often superior to my own. Why, then, was human memory apparently so faulty?

I began to study in earnest, eagerly devouring information about how the early Greeks had devised specific memory systems for various tasks; and how, later, the Romans applied these techniques to enable themselves...