In 1922, two Columbia University researchers compiled a list of 140 inventions and discoveries where the inventors, independently of each other, without knowing about each other, in different countries or even on different continents, had made the same invention or discovery within a short period of time.
On the same day in 1876 that Alexander Graham Bell filed a patent for the telephone, another filed the same patent a few hours later – in the same patent office. In 1745 and 1746, both Ewald Georg von Kleist and Pieter van Musschenbroek invented the electric battery. Josef Ressel, John Ericsson, Francis Pettit Smith, David Bushnell, and Robert Fulton independently invented the propeller within a short period of time.
How can it be that these people come up with the same idea at the same time? In fact, the question should be different: why don’t more people have the same idea? After all, an idea doesn’t come out of the blue. A technological breakthrough or invention ‘lies in the air.’ And that has to do with the underlying building blocks and the concept we call the ‘adjacent possible’.
Building Blocks
It all starts with the available building blocks. When the iPhone was announced in 2007, there were many who did not recognize it as innovative. ‘What’s new about it?’ All the technologies already existed. Touch screen, cell phone network, computer chip, operating system, app store, camera, apps, subscription model. None of these elements were new in themselves.
But they were the very building blocks that made the iPhone possible. That someone would combine these elements and create a new device was not a matter of ‘if’, but ‘when’. Some had already tried it. Nokia and Blackberry had created versions with some of these building blocks. But their efforts either had the wrong timing, ambition or functionality.
And that’s the key difference. The true achievement of an inventor is finding the right combination at the right time with the building blocks at hand. Many combinations and efforts fail. It took Thomas Edison thousands of attempts to find the right combination of building blocks that brought us the light bulb. One of the most important traits of inventors is determination.
We find the same in nature. Starting from the chemical elements as basic building blocks (let’s leave aside atoms, neutrons, electrons, quarks and such), the combination of elements led to new building blocks. If you combine hydrogen with oxygen, you get water. This is a prerequisite for other molecules – read: building blocks – to combine in turn. The number of building blocks increases. From just over 100 elements known today we come to hundreds of millions of organic and inorganic materials in different states.
These also bring us hundreds of millions of combinations that are not successful or stable. The first organic molecules brought us cells, which in turn combined ultimately led us to man. And millions of species in the hundreds of millions of years of evolution also disappeared again.
But we cannot go directly from the simple organic molecule to man. Quasi off the cuff from the first hydrocarbon compound to Homo Sapiens. It is a process of combining and recombining simple building blocks into more and more complex ones. This principle is called the ‘neighboring possible’. We can think of it as strolling from one room to the next through doors. If we take a house with thousands of rooms, we cannot simply take a shortcut from the first room to the hundredth. We have to go through the intervening 98 other rooms first.
Lego is a good example. What started with a handful of different shaped Lego bricks is now a universe of bricks that allows any Lego fan almost infinite Lego models. I remember the limited number of bricks available to me in my childhood and feel a bit overwhelmed when I look at all the bricks available today.
Future
Building blocks available today give us a taste of what technologies we will have in the future. At least those of the next five to ten years. In 2006, all the building blocks to make the iPhone possible were already there. It didn’t require much insight or psychic ability to predict it. In fact, it was predictable much earlier, as we can see in the next paragraph.
In 1999, David Gerrold wrote the following piece aboout a PITA for “The Future of Computing” in a technology magazine. The one he’s fabulating about here we know today as the smartphone and the current Facebook and Cambridge Analytica data-sharing scandal. A surprise? Not really, as we’ve already learned. But still, we have to acknowledge his foresight that came so early.
Predicting possible futures becomes an exercise in understanding what today’s technologies and business models from different industries look like, how they can be combined, how people will use them, and what problems they will solve.
The mistake experts tend to make is to draw their knowledge from their own narrow environment and industry. Although technologies and models may appear here as well, they are often dismissed as irrelevant single signals.
Yet one thing is always easy to predict: as soon as building blocks become available, people will connect them to other building blocks. The neighboring possible already describes the future today.