The good, the bad, and (even) the ugly: ideas travel, but how to make a difference?

A perspective that seems to have received almost universal traction over the last decades is that we live in a global community, where (hopefully good) ideas move easily from place to place, where people can meet and greet each other, interact, and create a better world together. Innovation magic attracts attention and creates happy well-being promises for all involved, under the premise that we should all look for, adopt, and diffuse new, useful, and diffusible ideas that can make real difference and impact on all our lives.

Ideas, packaged up as the new trading currency of knowledge, are the new shiny, fashionable toys that we present to each other as boundary spanning dream objects. We dig for these ideas in our own back yards, we look for them in the neighbourhood of academia and industry, and we elevate fashionable thinkers and doers to the pantheon of our worldwide gurus. To move these ideas between spaces and places, we educate and invest in airtime, printed verses, talk and physical proximity. One strand of thinking argues that we learn best from practice and experimental problem-solving in projects. We walk the talk, we spread ideas virally, and we argue for the special that we should all engage with. [...]