Debunking Bad Design Memes, Part 2: “Candles and Electric Light” quote
This quote has been present all around the conferences, internet, articles talking about innovation, and just generally appearing all around the place. I haven’t been to a single conference lately where at least one deck didn’t include this quote.
Now, before I dismantle this quote, I’d like to throw a caveat here that perhaps mr. Oren did have good intentions when coming up with this sentence, but somehow either failed to elaborate it, or in the good old fashion of internet propagation of information — key points got lost somewhere as people were copy/pasting this text. Oh, internets.
My intention is not to put words into mr. Oren’s mouth, or take things out of the context, my intention is to focus on how people look at this quote today, and what misconceptions this quote brings in today’s world.
The main message of this quote is that it takes an innovative eureka moment of a genius to change a certain category of a product.
In a very simplified model, let’s imagine that the category we are talking about is “house lighting”, and it can start with humans harnessing fire, then there is a magical innovative moment where we invent candles, and then a bit later there is another innovative moment where we invent light bulbs. These points are a “stroke of genius” moments, where some magical wizard came up with some brilliant new idea, and that idea completely changed the given category.
You can think of any amount of examples to parallel this.
Personal transportation category: “The Tesla Model S did not come from the continuos improvement of Ford Model T”
Communications category: “The iPhone did not come from the continuos improvement of Nokia 3210”
You could go on and on forever.
And yes, purely technically speaking, this is correct. But this view of the world removes extremely important points, which are; none of these inventions came into existence over night, all of them are a merger of previously improved product lines, and there there was no real innovation present for any of them.
iPhone is not truly innovative product.
Model S is not truly an innovative product.
They are the result of continuous improvement of their (sub)components existing in other areas, which got merged from those other areas into the destination category.
For example, let’s simplify the first iPhone’s innovation when it appeared. In simplified terms, the perceived innovation comes from the big & very responsive touch screen, internet connectivity and user experience of the operating system.
But each one of those segments was incrementally continuously improved on their own.
So this is the full picture:
Yes, iPhone did not come up by continuos improvement of Nokia 3210. But it did come by continuous improvements of many other components. And please ignore my potential ignorance here, the first iPhone had, in broad strokes, no real innovations inside it. It’s simply a mashup of various other already existing technologies. A clever mashup, created at the right time, but nevertheless it’s just a mashup of existing stuff.
iPhone is not an invention. It is a clever use of other technologies, brought together, and shifted into the “Communications” track of products.
Likewise with Tesla Model S. In broad strokes, it contains incrementally improved User Experience updates, incrementally improved materials, incrementally improved battery technology, etc. Again, Model S contains, generally speaking, no net-new things. It’s a mashup of other stuff, stuff which was incrementally improved over the previous years.
What about our light bulb? All of the elements comprising the bulb, as well as the system it sits in (electric network), are a result of incremental improvement. The network, the glass blowing technology, the filament inside it, every single component was painstakingly evolved through multiple iterations, and trials & errors.
It started in 1761 when Ebenezer Kinnersley demonstrated heating a wire leads to incandescence. That moment was the eureka inovation, but just that one thing was not enough to form a light bulb. It’s just one segment of it. From that moment on, lightbulb was indeed incrementally improved to have today’s modern incandescent light bulbs.
The reality is that real innovation is rare. Real, true, innovation comes at a moment when something was created which absolutely did not exist at all up to this point. When you cannot disassemble it and draw any line backwards in time to a previous version of it, or a sub-part of it.
Think about humans harnessing fire. For the longest time of our history, we had no idea how to start a fire. And then some clever humans figured it out. From that moment on, everything regarding fire was incrementally improved. From the initial flint & stone approach, to bow & string, through many more iterations until you hit Zippo or BIC fire lighter. You could track the development of fire starting tools backwards from Zippo, and you would see small incremental deteriorations as you go back. And eventually you will hit the wall in the past where the innovation of harnessing fire occurred.
Semi conductor, transistor, and binary technology is the same. It was invented a while back, and the history simply splits there to the time when we had no idea what transistors are, and when we knew what they are. Everything (again, excuse my brevity and broad strokes) Intel, AMD, and other processor manufacturers are doing since then is simply incremental improvement. Cramming more and more transistors into less and less space, energy efficiency, clock speed, architecture changes, multiple cores, and similar. But the basic principle — transistor — was the real innovation.
The damage the original quote is doing is that it removes the broad vision of what it actually takes to create and introduce a new product. It does not address what real innovation is, it presumes fully made products are just created out of thin air and introduced into the mass market.
And the reality cannot be further than this. True innovation is rare, and “light bulb” type of innovation relies on continuous improvement.
Do not disregard the continuous incremental improvement! It’s how most products come to be.
“The electric light did not come from the continuos improvement of candles.”
– Oren Harari
