Sleeping Beauties: Why Good Ideas Go Dormant and How They Wake Up

"Discoveries as diverse as dark matter, lichen, and continental drift. Technologies from solar panels to the steam engine. Artists from Bach to Bruegel, Vermeer to Melville. All, David Byrne shows us, were sleeping beauties. Ranging across many centuries and the full scope of human endeavor, Byrne explains how the shock of the new landed like a blow on vested interests and entrenched views. Often suppression came from pushback, or the absence of key supporters, or simply the lack of complementary economic conditions to create requisite incentives. Again and again, Byrne finds, someone from a different discipline broke into the silo, often someone open to metaphorical thinking, to the counterintuitive. Sleeping Beauties illustrates how not to be blind to the next great thing"--