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„Old Ideas can sometimes use new buildings. New ideas must use old buildings.“ ~ Jane Jacobs
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Yeah, well, not really. Source
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There are countless evocative phrases and figures of speech around innovation. ‚Disruption‘ is still in everyone’s mouth, and the technology-oriented post-war western societies love innovation when it presents itself as new, as fantastic, as coming from the „space age“.
But it is not without irony that we have such difficulties understanding innovation and progress. We love the Space Age, but are unable to depict spacecraft that do not move like aircraft (if they are small), or ships (if they are large). We cannot fathom interplanetary distances or speeds, and insist that there is sound in the vacuum of space. We're not watching something new. That's just old ideas dressed up as something fancy.
And then there’s a different idea of how innovation works, verbalized in the semi-famous „Standing on the shoulders of giants“, first put into writing by Bernard of Chartres in the 12th century. (Yes. The Present is Old.)
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Cedalion standing on the shoulders of the blind giant Orion Source
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Within this view, scientific progress always happens - has to happen - in iterations. One step after the other. You cannot leapfrog these steps. You can try, but you will fail.
And the same is true for ideas. Of course it’s possible that you invent something really, really new. Jumping over a view intermittent steps. But it is very likely that society at large will not understand what you are doing, and will reject your innovation.
While investigating how complex life (or any life, for that matter) can come into existence and evolve, Stuart Kauffman coined the term ‚the adjacent possible‘.
Simplified, the adjacent possible is made up of all first-order interactions and combinations an environment is able to create. Everything else that might be further down the line is simply unachievable. We can dream up spaceships, but we cannot build them because there is no way to combine all the factors of our society in such a way that the building of a spaceship could emerge.
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How does the adjacent possible relate to innovation?
When people dreamt up the future of mobility, the books were full of flying cars, personal helicopters, and single-person airplanes. Yet, none of this came to be. Instead, we got the electric car.
What is it good for? Why does it even exist? What problems does it solve? There’s still congestion on the streets, you still have to hunt for a parking spot after you’ve driven home from work. It even needs refilling.
If we are going to computerize the automobile, why not immediately switch to autonomous driving? And if the cars drive themselves, what sense makes it to own them?
Why don’t we create a socialized car pool? Shared cars pick up passengers and deliver them to where they need to be without the hassle of owning a car?
And if we do that, isn’t that just some version of individualized public transport? And if that’s the future, why do we keep working on electric cars, and not on autonomous, individualized public transport?
If you follow the idea of the adjacent possible, the answer could be: Because autonomous, individualized public transport is not a first-order combination of the factors at play.
What is possible is an electric car that works like a regular one because it’s an innovation people can understand. What’s also possible is Uber, some kind of cheap version of a taxi company that is a bit of combination of low-cost public transport and highly-individualized cab service.
So that’s what we get, because that’s what can be done.
A lot of possible things are further down the line, but before we can go there, we need to create many new first-order combinations of what is possible, right here, right now.
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Can innovation actually be disruptive?
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Some construction details of the Eiffel Tower. Source
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Depending on what you mean by ‚disruptive‘, I doubt it. If by ‚disruptive‘ you mean: ‚This will overturn current market forces and dramatically shift economic power between players‘, then yes. Has happened all the time throughout human history, but the pace at which it is happening now is astounding.
If you mean ‚this radically changes the lives of a significant number of people from one day to the other‘, then I would say political revolutions and natural disasters can do this. Inventions probably not.
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Is innovation beyond the obvious impossible?
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Poster for the movie Flash Gordon
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On the contrary. What the adjacent possible shows that if anything, innovation is always within reach, and probably easier to achieve than we think.
The Adjacent Possible says that besides thinking about our goals and the place where we want to end up, we also have to take into account our surroundings. To ask ourselves: „What is the next step from here?“
And also: „What factors need to be present before this can actually work?“
It also says that every innovation needs an ecosystem in which it can develop and grow.
Strava needed the widespread adaption of GPS-sensors before their ideas of a social network for athletes could work. Once GPS-enabled bike computers and smartphones were common place in the athletic community, Strava was a first-order connection of existing technologies. Before that, it was simply not possible to create.
And finally, the adjacent possible explains why sometimes, you have to dress up innovation as something that already exists. A new idea that needs an old house as disguise.
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"What the adjacent possible tells us is that at any moment the world is capable of extraordinary change, but only certain changes can happen.“ ~ Steven Johnson
Thank you for reading this edition of Let’s Be Fwends. I tried to incorporate your feedback. You told me that the new format is nice, but make it short, and a bit easy on the information density. Let me know how I did! (I think I failed on the ‚shorter‘ thing).
Flu-season is officially over in Austria, and spring has arrived. We survived yet another grim winter. Please high-five yourself in celebration! 🎉
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