Mind Maps
A working series on Contemporary Topics in Innovation. Each map distills a field into six branches and three levels of nesting — the shape a topic has when you ask "what are all the things a practitioner needs to hold in their head at once."
The series began as a private research exercise in 2024 and is being migrated into this site one topic at a time. The maps are structured data, not PDFs — they render as interactive radial trees, hover-traceable to the center, and can be linked from within the essays when they ground a specific argument.
The series
Contemporary Topics in User Experience Designlive
Six branches the UX field currently organizes around — principles, research methods, tools, emerging trends, challenges, and future directions — with three to four levels of nesting under each.
Contemporary Topics in Venture Capitallive
Expanded mind map of contemporary venture capital as it stands in 2026. Six branches and ~150 named facts: AI + climate + bio + defense emerging areas; stage-focused, thesis-driven, alternative-structure, and specialized strategies; legacy + growth + ascendant + solo players; valuation, regulatory, exit, and LP risks; AI deal sourcing, portfolio tooling, data platforms, and on-chain structures; AI-native firms, geographic diffusion, evolving fund structures, and power-law dynamics.
Apple Inc.planned
Apple as a mind map: founding and philosophy, product innovation, software innovation, services and ecosystem, sustainability and social responsibility, and future trends.
Silicon Valley Innovation Historylive
Expanded mind map across seven eras of Silicon Valley — radio origins (1900–1955), the Semiconductor Era (1955–75), Microprocessor + PC (1971–95), Internet + Dot-Com (1993–2007), Mobile + Social (2007–20), the AI Era (2015–26), and the 2020–2030 future-and-challenges horizon. ~200 named facts.
Thomas Edison and Innovationplanned
Edison as a mind map across six dimensions: early life, major inventions, business ventures and partnerships, impact on technology and society, challenges and controversies, legacy and recognition.
Expanded mind map of innovation across human history: pre-industrial foundations (pre-1760), First Industrial Revolution (1760–1840), Second Industrial Revolution (1870–1914), 20th-century science and engineering (1914–1970), Information Age (1970–2010), Contemporary Era (2010–2026), and the theoretical patterns (Kondratieff, Schumpeter, Christensen, S-curves, combinatorial innovation) that organize the whole.
Systems Software & Protocolslive
Survey of the systems-software layer: operating systems from batch-processing mainframes through Unix to mobile and cloud; database architectures from hierarchical to relational to NoSQL to vector; networking protocols from packet-switching through TCP/IP to modern satellite and mesh; the standards and organizations that made interoperability possible.
Survey of artificial intelligence: the symbolic era (logic, expert systems, GOFAI); the first and second connectionist waves; deep learning (ImageNet through transformers); large language models and foundation models; agentic systems; the alignment, evaluation, and scaling debates.
Survey of robotics and automation: kinematics and control theory; industrial arms from Unimate to modern cobots; mobile and autonomous robots; humanoid and general-purpose platforms; swarm robotics; the sensing, actuation, and compute stacks that enable them.
Semiconductors & Microelectronicslive
Survey of semiconductors and microelectronics: solid-state physics foundations; the transistor and the integrated circuit; photolithography and modern fabrication; Moore's Law, Dennard scaling, and the post-scaling era; specialized accelerators (GPU, TPU, custom silicon); the industry structure from IDM to fabless-foundry.
Cryptographylive
Survey of cryptography: classical ciphers and codebreaking; Shannon's information-theoretic foundations; public-key cryptography (Diffie-Hellman, RSA, elliptic-curve); protocols and standards (TLS, Signal, Tor); hash functions and digital signatures; zero-knowledge proofs; post-quantum cryptography.
Survey of quantum technology: the physics (superposition, entanglement, decoherence); quantum computing architectures (superconducting, trapped-ion, photonic, topological); quantum algorithms (Shor, Grover, VQE) and complexity claims; quantum sensing (NV centers, atom interferometry); quantum communication (QKD, quantum repeaters).
Survey of space and spaceflight: chemical rocketry foundations; the Space Race and Apollo; the Shuttle and Station era; the commercial-space pivot (SpaceX, Rocket Lab, reusability); satellite constellations (GPS, Starlink); planetary exploration; the economics and geopolitics of modern space.
Industrial Processesplanned
Survey of industrial processes: chemical engineering unit operations (distillation, reaction, separation); the Haber-Bosch and catalytic cracking revolutions; interchangeable parts and the moving assembly line; the Toyota Production System and lean manufacturing; process control and Six Sigma; additive manufacturing; modern semiconductor fabrication.
Survey of medicine and biotech: pharmaceuticals from natural-product isolation through rational drug design to AI-discovered candidates; medical devices and imaging; diagnostics from microscopy through sequencing; vaccines (classical through mRNA); genetic medicine and CRISPR therapeutics; public health and epidemiology.
Energylive
Survey of energy: thermodynamic foundations; generation technologies (fossil, hydro, nuclear fission, renewables, fusion); storage (pumped hydro, lithium-ion, solid-state, flow batteries, hydrogen); transmission and the grid; efficiency and demand-side management; the policy and economics of energy transitions.
Contemporary Topics in Industrial Designlive
Survey of contemporary industrial design: materials and processes; form-giving and ergonomics; design-for-manufacturing and design-for-assembly; sustainability and circularity; emerging aesthetics and movements; the structure of the modern industrial-design profession.
Contemporary Topics in Organizational Designlive
Survey of contemporary organizational design: structural archetypes (functional, divisional, matrix, network, platform); coordination mechanisms and information flow; culture, identity, and selection; incentives and compensation design; scale transitions; remote and distributed work; the practitioner literature from Drucker through modern org-design consultancies.
Contemporary Topics in Governmentlive
Survey of contemporary government: constitutional and administrative design; bureaucratic theory; public finance and regulation; policy innovation and implementation; technology in government and digital services; elections, representation, and legitimacy; the comparative study of governmental systems.
Survey of the theory of innovation: Schumpeterian creative destruction; Christensen's disruption; Rogers' diffusion of innovations; Kondratieff waves and Perez's technological surges; S-curves, learning curves, and network effects; Kuhn's paradigm shifts; combinatorial innovation; contemporary scholars (Christensen, Arthur, Thiel, Gordon, Mokyr) and their debates.
Survey of information theory: Shannon's 1948 foundations; entropy, mutual information, and channel capacity; source coding and data compression; error-correcting codes; Kolmogorov complexity; information theory in statistics, machine learning, and biology; modern extensions (rate-distortion, network information theory).
Systems Thinking & Cyberneticsplanned
Survey of systems thinking and cybernetics: Wiener's cybernetics; control theory and feedback; system dynamics (Forrester, Meadows); complexity science and emergence; Ashby's law of requisite variety; soft systems methodology; applications in management, policy, and ecology.
Paradigm Shiftsplanned
Survey of paradigm shifts: Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions; Popper's falsifiability and Lakatos' research programmes; case studies (Copernican, Darwinian, quantum, plate tectonics, germ theory, genetic); the sociology of scientific revolutions; contemporary debates on replication and reform.
The Industrial Revolutionsplanned
Survey of the four industrial revolutions: the First (1760–1840, steam and textiles); the Second (1870–1914, electricity, steel, chemistry); the Third (1950–2000, digital and automation); the Fourth (2000–present, AI, biotech, cyber-physical systems); the comparative patterns in geography, labor, capital, and social effects.
The Great Industrial Research Labslive
Survey of the great industrial research labs: Edison's Menlo Park; GE Research; Bell Labs; Xerox PARC; IBM Research; Lockheed's Skunkworks; Microsoft Research; Google X and DeepMind; OpenAI and Anthropic; the institutional designs, funding mechanisms, and cultural conditions that produced durable invention — and their failure modes.
Revolutionary Technologiesplanned
Survey of a handful of world-changing technologies: the transistor and solid-state electronics; the laser; the integrated circuit and Moore's Law; GPS and satellite navigation; the internet and TCP/IP; CRISPR-Cas9 genome editing; the common pattern — decades of quiet foundational work followed by a rapid deployment phase.