Remixing your way to innovation: The Adjacent Possible

Image Source: GatesNotes (The Blog of Bill Gates)

I have been reading a great book lately called Where Good Ideas Come From: A Natural History of Innovation by Steven Johnson.

Johnson discusses one of the important principles of innovation, called the Adjacent Possible. The concept of the Adjacent Possible is that innovation is enabled — and constrained — by the inputs that are available at the time to the innovation. This is because most innovations are combinations of existing components. What the Adjacent Possible implies is that innovation occurs when we build upon the state of the art, the available technological and conceptual inputs. This in turn means that we need to constantly educate ourselves about the state of the art, and experiment around the edges of the Adjacent Possible.

As Johnson says:

“Good ideas are not conjured out of thin air; they are built out of a collection of existing parts, the composition of which expands (and, occasionally, contracts) over time. Some of those parts are conceptual: ways of solving problems, or new definitions of what constitutes a problem in the first place.”

As a great example, he analyzes the introduction of the NeoNurture device, a low-cost neonatal incubator (baby warmer) in Africa in the mid-2000s.

The context is that neonatal incubators have been around since the late 1800s. Across the 20th century, the technology and performance of neonatal incubators continued to improve. As Johnson writes:

“Modern incubators, supplemented with high-oxygen therapy and other advances, became standard equipment in all American hospitals after the end of World War II, triggering a spectacular 75 percent decline in infant mortality rates between 1950 and 1998.”

The technology for incubators was present in developed countries like the US and Western Europe. However, this technology was cost prohibitive for developing countries. These countries also lacked the expertise and spare parts to maintain the devices when a component failed and needed to be repaired. A small group of scientists and engineers developed the NeoNurture device, which used automobile spare parts in order to reduce the cost of the technology and make it easier to maintain.

“From the outside, it looked like a streamlined modern incubator, but its guts were automotive. Sealed-beam headlights supplied the crucial warmth; dashboard fans provided filtered air circulation; door chimes sounded alarms. Building the NeoNurture out of car parts was doubly efficient, because it tapped both the local supply of parts themselves and the local knowledge of automobile repair.”

All of a sudden, neonatal incubators were now feasible for developing countries. The innovation here was about remixing and recombining the automotive spare parts that already existed — building upon the current state of the art, rather than inventing something completely from the ground up.

Many innovations follow this pattern of remixing and recombining the existing components into something much better. Back in the early 1980s, Apple borrowed the Graphic UI of windows, mouse, and drag-and-drop from XeroxParc, and then combined it with existing hardware and software components to produce an innovation in personal computers — the Apple Macintosh.

“Remixing” is not limited only to recombining existing parts. You can drastically improve one of the key inputs and then combine it with other existing components. For example, Tesla drastically improved electric battery performance and combined this with existing automobile components to produce a new innovation in electric vehicles.

So innovation is somewhat constrained by what is “state of the art” at the time. The author observes:

“The adjacent possible is a kind of shadow future, hovering on the edges of the present state of things, a map of all the ways in which the present can reinvent itself. Yet is it not an infinite space, or a totally open playing field. The number of potential first-order reactions is vast, but it is a finite number… What the adjacent possible tells us is that at any moment the world is capable of extraordinary change, but only certain changes can happen.”

The concept of the Adjacent Possible means that if we want to innovate, we need to be aware of the existing inputs — the “state of the art” — that we can remix and recombine. Using the analogy of the NeoNurture, we need to know what spare parts we can use. And the amazing thing is that as we operate on the frontiers of the Adjacent Possible, we push the boundaries forward. The author uses the analogy of opening doors in a house to illustrate this point.

“The strange and beautiful truth about the adjacent possible is that its boundaries grow as you explore those boundaries. Each new combination ushers new combinations into the adjacent possible. Think of it as a house that magically expands with each door you open. You begin in a room with four doors, each leading to a new room that you haven’t visited yet. Those four rooms are the adjacent possible. But once you open one of those doors and stroll into that room, three new doors appear, each leading to a brand-new room that you couldn’t have reached from your original starting point. Keep opening new doors and eventually you’ll have built a palace.”

The key is to experiment on the edges of the Adjacent Possible. When we begin our experimentation, there are only a known set of doors available. However, as we test a new hypothesis, we learn something that opens a new set of doors for us. We continue to iterate on the learning, and open one of the new doors, which then leads to yet another set of new doors. And so on, as we continue to iterate.

Once we have identified the edges of the Adjacent Possible, we can experiment on the edges in a couple of ways. We can take a directed experimentation approach, or we can wander. In the former approach (“directed”), we have identified a particular problem we would like to solve, and we recombine the available inputs on the edge of the Adjacent Possible through multiple iterations to solve it. This is what Tesla did when it improved electric battery performance and combined it with existing automobile components — unlocking the innovation of electric vehicles that could store more energy and operate over longer distances before needing to be recharged.

In the latter approach (“wander”), we use the available inputs in the edge of the Adjacent Possible, and we just play. We try things. We don’t know if they will work, we don’t even know for sure what problems we’re solving (though we may have some hypotheses). We’re wandering on the edges of the Adjacent Possible to see if there’s value.

Jeff Bezos, in his recent podcast with Lex Fridman, discussed this idea of wandering.

“I know it [innovation] involves lots of wandering, so when I sit down to work on a problem, I know I don’t know where I’m going. So, to go in a straight line… To be efficient… Efficiency and invention are sort of at odds… Incremental improvement is so important in every endeavor, in everything you do, you have to work hard on also just making things a little bit better. But I’m talking about real invention, real lateral thinking that requires wandering, and you have to give yourself permission to wander. I think a lot of people feel like wandering is inefficient.”

We have been discussing the concept of Adjacent Possible for some time — let’s summarize and take-away and discuss implications. The key takeaways are the following:

• The Adjacent Possible is a concept that argues that the frontiers of innovation are defined by the state of the art at the time — what “spare parts” are available to be remixed and recombined into an innovation.
• Most innovations build upon the state of the art, where they take the available inputs and combine them into something new. Apple’s PC innovation, Tesla’s electric car innovation follow the same pattern.
• Innovation requires us to educate ourselves about the state of the art, so that we are building upon the latest and greatest inputs for our innovation.
• Operating on the edges of the Adjacent Possible can allow us to “open new doors” and push forward the boundaries of the Adjacent Possible.
• To operate on the edges of the Adjacent Possible, we can take either a directed experimentation approach or we can just wander.

What are the important implications for us as entrepreneurs and product leaders?

• Don’t reinvent the wheel. Truly “breakthrough” innovations, that transcend their surroundings and jump ahead of all of the adjacent possible, are very few and far between. It’s much better to look first at how others are solving this problem, and then what you can do on top of that to make it better. Stay on top of what the “spare parts” are. Look at the latest innovations from competitors and other products. These are the “spare parts” you can use to reinvent the present.
• Think about how you can use the “spare parts” on the edges of the Adjacent Possible. You can recombine existing spare parts (as Apple did with the Macintosh PC), or you can improve upon one of the spare parts (as Tesla did with electric batteries). The combination of these spare parts should be much better than the status quo.
• Allocate some time to wander on the edges of the Adjacent Possible. Reserve some of your team’s bandwidth to just experiment. Try new combinations of things, even if you don’t know for certain what problem you’re solving (although you should have a hypothesis). Wander and explore the Adjacent Possible. This is where opportunistic experimentation comes into play.
• Involve engineers and designers as early as possible in the ideation process. Engineers can use the latest technological advances and designers can use the latest design and UX patterns to push the boundaries of the adjacent possible.