The coffeehouse model of creativity helps explain one of those strange paradoxes of twenty-first-century business innovation. Even as much of the high-tech culture has embraced decentralized, liquid networks in their approach to innovation, the company that is consistently ranked as the most innovative in the world—Apple—remains defiantly top-down and almost comically secretive in its development of new products. You won’t ever see Steve Jobs or Jonathan Ive crowdsourcing development of the next-generation iPhone.
