Local networks mean the system hunts ideas that are already linked up in the brain (i.e. already established in neural nets).

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One thing to note is how many of the ideas below can be linked by their desire to make the shopping experience more enjoyable, be it through speeding up payments and helping customers skip queues, providing a uniquely quiet and relaxed retail environment, or gamifying shopping by enabling customers to pay with points earned exercising.

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Ideas are assessed by dedicated committees linked to operational functions, and funding for implementation comes from the savings that the concepts generate.

FORBES: How to Keep Big Ideas Big

Nor does he earn much affection for proposing ideas such as the abolition of index-linked pensions economically sensible, but electorally suicidal in a country where almost a quarter of the voters are over 60.

ECONOMIST: Uruguay

You're surfing around the internet, and you bump into things because it's linked, and you fumble onto new stories or new ideas or things that you didn't think would interest you, but now they do.

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From her base in Hong Kong she has also spread her ideas about fashion and lifestyle through her writing and participation in panels and forums linked to fashion, design and creative industries.

FORBES

The EU's foreign-policy chief, Cathy Ashton, is being showered with ideas: Germany says EU support (including lifting barriers to agricultural trade) should be linked to democratic reforms.

ECONOMIST: Charlemagne

The financial meltdown has certainly undermined two of the big ideas inspired by Messrs Jensen and Meckling: that senior managers' pay should be closely linked to their firm's share price, and that private equity, backed by mountains of debt, would do a better job of getting managers to maximise value than the public equity markets.

ECONOMIST: Shareholders v stakeholders