A remarkably common pattern for the evolution of many things. You see it all the time in the evolution of technical things, but also many systems in general.

When you start to reach the top of the limits of what one system can do you’ll start to see a focus on efficiency, cost reduction and small improvements and optimisation. This is great because it forces a new creative solution to arise in order to make any real progress. An image search gives a few examples.

Also, see some related sketchplanations: The long nose of innovation, designing for adoption, understanding the chasm.

The S-curve.

I love this concept from Stewart Brand, that different aspects of the world change at different speeds. So, fashion and art changes and cycles faster than commerce which is faster than infrastructure, and in turn governance, culture and finally Nature. The outer layers tend to innovate faster and so pull along, or be stabilised by, the lower, slower layers. At the boundaries you get constructive turbulence, say between Uber and governance, or how the growth in video streaming requires Internet infrastructure to come along with it. I’m sure you can find counter examples, but as a framework for thinking about big complex things I find it quite handy.

Pace layers

Nifty water camouflage practised by dolphins, porpoises, some fish and other neat sea creatures. The simple strategy: look light like the sky for anyone below, and look dark like the sea for anyone above. 

Counter-shading

Cheat sheet for Crossing the Chasm by Geoffrey Moore

Understanding the Chasm

Maslow’s is interesting, but not terribly helpful if you want to use it for something. This one however, I still find a very useful framework when designing (read about it in the DMI paper System Logics). Your sweet spots for the exciting innovations are the context and activity level needs. 

Patnaik’s Hierarchy of Needs

I love Bill Buxton’s Long Nose of Innovation theory that basically a ton of small incremental work precedes what feels like a wow innovation moment. Computer mice, touchscreens, robotics, CNC machining, haptics etc were all around for decades before they hit the big time.

The Long Nose of Innovation

Having played the piano most of my life I only started composing when I started spontaneously dropping by the music practice rooms at UC Berkeley in the middle of the day. Without any music I was practically forced to start making things up. Every now and then it’s new and nice. You can listen to a few short piano pieces on youtube.

I strongly believe in this as advice, but it does presuppose years of copying and playing others’ music as well as the basics of music theory. Replicate, then innovate.

Sketchplanations tagged with innovation