Many books have tried to solve the puzzle of how innovation happens. The sheer range of answers is telling. Joel Mokyr’s A Culture of Growth looks at the huge forces in the background. Mokyr emphasizes the political fragmentation of Enlightenment Europe, which left intellectuals free to move around, escaping persecution and seeking patrons. Steven Johnson’s Where Good Ideas Come From zooms in closer, looking at the networks of people who share ideas, from the coffeehouses of the 1650s to Silicon Valley today. Keith Sawyer’s Explaining Creativity looks more closely still, drawing on ideas in neuroscience and cognitive psychology. And there are countless other perspectives on the question.
This book doesn’t focus on the question of how inventions come into being—it is more interested in the question of what inventions do to the social and economic structures that surround us. But almost in passing, we’ve already learned a lot about where inventions come from.
There’s the demand-driven invention: we don’t know who invented the plow, but we do know that it was a response to a changing world; foraging nomads didn’t suddenly invent the technology and then take up agriculture in order to use it. Another example is barbed wire: everybody could see the need for it. Joseph Glidden produced the most practical version of many competing designs, but we know little about the details of his creative process. It seems to have been rather mundane. After all, in retrospect the design was obvious enough. Glidden just realized it first.
On the flip side, there’s the supply-push invention. Betty Cronin worked for a company, Swanson, that had made good money supplying preserved rations to American troops in World War II. Now the company had the capacity and the technology, but it needed to find a new market: the frozen TV dinner was the result of this hunt for profits.
There’s invention by analogy: Sergey Brin and Larry Page developed their search algorithm drawing inspiration from academic citations; Joseph Woodland developed the bar code as he dragged his fingers through sand and pondered Morse code.
That said, the bar code itself was invented independently several times. The sticking point was the internal politics of the U.S. retailing industry. This reminds us that there’s more to an invention than the inventing of it. It wouldn’t be entirely wrong to say that Malcom McLean “invented” the shipping container, but it’s more illuminating to describe the obstacles he had to overcome in getting the system to take off.
The truth is that even for a single invention, it’s often hard to pin down a single person who was responsible—and it’s even harder to find a “eureka” moment when the idea all came together. Many of the inventions discussed in this book have many parents; they often evolved over decades or centuries. The honest answer to the question “Where do inventions come from?” is “Almost anywhere you can imagine.”