Is Innovation Inevitable? Science surprisingly says so!
It happened in the early morning hours on the 14th of August 1901 in Bridgeport near the village of Fairfield. Gustav Albin Weißkopf, a German immigrant and son of a civil engineer, invited the press to witness an innovation, so daring, that most people at that time doubted it was possible at all. Gustav wanted to demonstrate nothing less than the first manned, engine powered flight in history. A handful of journalists eventually made it to the field outside of Bridgeport. Most likely most of them were curious to see a man plunge into a tree or some similar amusing misfortune. While unfortunately no photograph exists of this event, witnesses report that Gustav actually succeeded in demonstrating that his flying machine is capable of full engine-power flight. Over 300 newspapers reported in the following days of the first successful, motor-powered flight of a human being. A fact that got forgotten for quite a while.
Two years later, on a cold December day in 1903, the brothers Wright performed their famous first motor flight, four miles south of Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. A famous photo exists of this flight and their 1903 Wright Flyer is ever since one of the most visited exhibitions of the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum inWashington, DC. Recently, experts claim that the photo was actually taken at a later flight in 1906. More importantly, it was discovered that the brothers wright set up a contract with the Smithsonian that their gift of the 1903 Wright Flyer exhibit was tied to the obligation to name the brothers wright the inventors of the plane. Aviation experts and historians have now accumulated a massive amount of evidence that actually it was Weißkopf how flew first with a motorized plane. Nonetheless it seems hard to change a fact that was printed into virtually every schoolbook in the world for a century.
For me, the more interesting question, however, is not who was first to fly, but why two men invented the same thing independent from each other, almost at the same time.
Have you ever asked yourself how it is possible that multiple inventions happen at the same time? Why has nobody invented the plane in 1850, but multiple persons independently invented it around 1900?
Actually, this is a very common pattern in innovation history. This pattern was first investigated by the researchers William F. Ogburn and Dorothy Thomas in their 1922 paper Are Inventions Inevitable? A Note on Social Evolution. The renowned sociologist at Columbia University and his graduate student listed 148 major inventions and discoveries which were made independently by two or more two or more groups at the same time. A similar study by Merton in 1960 led him to conclude that “the pattern of independent multiple discoveries in science is in principle the dominant pattern, rather than a subsidiary one”. Today, there is even a wikipedia list of multiple invention continuously expanded (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_multiple_discoveries). Examples include the atomic bomb, the jet engine, cosmic background radiation and quantum cryptography – just to name a few.
Evolutionary biologist Stuart Kauffmann described this effect as the adjacent possible – uncharted space on the edges of current knowledge with nothing in it, yet the place where new ideas emerge quickly. Within this sphere, innovation happens fast and so manifold that it is quite common to see multiple inventions at the same time emerging independently. The original concept explains selection and novelty as a sequence how evolutionary niches get occupied by new species. The basic idea is that evolution always searches space for possibilities. Such possibilities are one step away from what already exists. Think of all those initial molecules in the primordial soup after the earth’s creation, and then imagine all the potential new combinations that they could form spontaneously, simply by colliding with each other (or perhaps supported by some extra energy of a lightning strike). If you could play God and trigger all those combinations, you would end up with most of the building blocks of life: such as proteins that form the boundaries of cells or sugar molecules, which are crucial to the nucleic acids of our DNA. But you would not be able to trigger chemical reactions that are necessary to build an elephant, a sunflower, or a human brain. Creating a sunflower, however, relies on a whole series of subsequent innovations: chloroplasts to capture the sun’s energy, vascular tissues to circulate resources through the plant, DNA molecules to pass on instructions to the next generation (Johnson, 2010).
Systems, may it be on the molecular, morphological, behavioral, technological or organizational sphere, explore the adjacent possible while mutating their characteristics. If systems can adapt to such new spaces, they successfully find new ways of making a living.
Immediate change is limited to options that are only one step (intellectual or biological) away. But once such changes are made, then new opportunities become adjacent (i.e. just one step away) and therefore possible. One way to illustrate this concept is to imagine a conceptual room that has an entrance and several possible exits, represented as doors that are ajar rather than closed. You can never jump many rooms ahead, but are limited to progress one room at a time – through a door that someone else may be using as well.
Resources:
Felin, T.; Kauffman, S.; Koppl, R. & Longo, G. (2014). Economic opportunity and evolution: Beyond landscapes and bounded rationality, Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal, 8 (4), pp. 269-282.
Johnson, S. (2010). Where good ideas come from: the natural history of innovation, New York: Riverhead Books.
Kauffman, Stuart. (1996). At Home in the Universe: The Search for the Laws of Self-Organization and Complexity.
William F. Ogburn and Dorothy Thomas Political Science Quarterly, Vol. 37, No. 1 (Mar., 1922), pp. 83-98
http://www.gustave-whitehead.com/
