There’s an old joke about the Velvet Underground that I think is attributed to Brian Eno: only thirty thousand people bought the first VU album, but everyone who bought it went on to form their own band.

Scenius is like genius, only embedded in a scene rather than in genes. Brian Eno suggested the word to convey the extreme creativity that groups, places or “scenes”  can occasionally generate. His actual definition is:  “Scenius stands for the intelligence and the intuition of a whole cultural scene. It is the communal form of the concept of the genius.”

A few years ago I came up with a new word. I was fed up with the oldart-history idea of genius - the notion that gifted individuals turn up out ofnowhere and light the way for all the rest of us dummies to follow. Ibecame (and still am) more and more convinced that the importantchanges in cultural history were actually the product of very large numbers of people and circumstances conspiring to make something new. Icall this ‘scenius’ - it means ‘the intelligence and intuition of a whole cultural scene’. It is the communal form of the concept of genius. This word isnow starting to gain some currency - the philosopher James Ogilvy uses itin his most recent book.

I think that there’s also the kind of what Brian Eno called scenius, that there are times like Xerox PARC in the 1970s or Florence during the Renaissance when there are just a number of people in contact with each other, and their ideas spark each other. And again, it’s a matter of building on what has been done before.

The Engelbart story is also a wonderful case study in collaborative innovation, and the strange tendency of certain places at certain moments in time to produce a disproportionate number of new ideas:A few decades ago, the musician and artist Brian Eno coined a term to describe the collective IQ of creative hubs at their peak: Florence in the 1500s, Harlem in the 1920s. He called that group creativity “scenius”.

what Brian Eno called scenius,

“Scenius is like genius, only embedded in a scene rather than in genes.”

I became (and still am) more and more convinced that the important changes in cultural history were actually the product of very large numbers of people and circumstances conspiring to make something new. I call this ‘scenius’ - it means ‘the intelligence and intuition of a whole cultural scene’. It is the communal form of the concept of genius.