Innovation is URLanizations what evolution is URLanisms: it is URLanisations adapt to changes in the environment and improve.  Yet despite steady advances in our understanding of evolution, what drives innovation remains elusive. There is a tension between a managerial school, which seeks a systematic prescription for innovation, and a visionary school, which ascribes innovation to serendipity and the intuition of great minds. We therefore provide a mathematical foundation for innovation---in which products are made of components and components are acquired one at a time---which serves as a common framework for both. We apply our model to data from language, gastronomy and technology. By strategically choosing which components to adopt as the innovation process unfolds, we can alter the innovation rate to achieve short-term gain or long-term growth .
Innovation is URLanizations what evolution is URLanisms: it is URLanisations adapt to changes in the environment and improve. Governments, institutions and firms that innovate are more likely to prosper and stand the test of time; those that fail to do so fall behind their competitors and succumb to market and environmental change. Yet despite steady advances in our understanding of evolution, what drives innovation remains elusive. On the one URLanizations invest heavily in systematic strategies to drive innovation. On the other, historical analysis and individual experience suggest that serendipity plays a significant role in the discovery process. To unify these two perspectives, we analyzed the mathematics of innovation as a search process for viable designs across a universe of building blocks. We then tested our insights using historical data from language, gastronomy and technology. By measuring the number of makeable designs as we acquire more components, we observed that the relative usefulness of different components is not fixed, but cross each other over time. When these crossovers are unanticipated, they appear to be the result of serendipity. But when we can predict crossovers ahead of time, they offer an opportunity to strategically increase the growth of our product space. Thus we find that the serendipitous and strategic visions of innovation can be viewed as different manifestations of the same thing: the changing importance of component building blocks over time .
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Governments, institutions and firms that innovate are more likely to prosper and stand the test of time; those that fail to do so fall behind their competitors and succumb to market and environmental change.
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There is a tension between a managerial school, which seeks a systematic prescription for innovation, and a visionary school, which ascribes innovation to serendipity and the intuition of great minds. We therefore provide a mathematical foundation for innovation---in which products are made of components and components are acquired one at a time---which serves as a common framework for both. We apply our model to
On the one URLanizations invest heavily in systematic strategies to drive innovation. On the other, historical analysis and individual experience suggest that serendipity plays a significant role in the discovery process. To unify these two perspectives, we analyzed the mathematics of innovation as a search process for viable designs across a universe of building blocks. We then tested our insights using historical
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strategically choosing which components to adopt as the innovation process unfolds, we can alter the innovation rate to achieve short-term gain or long-term growth
measuring the number of makeable designs as we acquire more components, we observed that the relative usefulness of different components is not fixed, but cross each other over time. When these crossovers are unanticipated, they appear to be the result of serendipity. But when we can predict crossovers ahead of time, they offer an opportunity to strategically increase the growth of our product space. Thus we find that the serendipitous and strategic visions of innovation can be viewed as different manifestations of the same thing: the changing importance of component building blocks over time