Steve Jurvetson explains how big innovations come from recombining existing ideas. He uses Reed's Law to show how idea combinations grow exponentially, argues the scientific method was the pivotal invention that changed everything, and traces how cities and cross-disciplinary mixing accelerate creativity.
Chapters
There were 3 books that came out all in the same year, ironically, that talk about the same general concept, that every good idea is a combination of good ideas that came before it. There's the old metaphor of standing on the shoulders of giants, but you can think about it more specifically, almost like a memetic analogy to genetics, meaning ideas are like genes and they recombine in different and interesting ways, and that creates new ideas. So in history, there have been fascinating examples. I'm reading a variety of biographies of Nikola Tesla, And even just last night, yet another anecdote that the invention of radio, which has been highly contested as to who was the first. I grew up being told it was Marconi in Italy. And then recently the U.S. Supreme Court said, no, no, it was Nikola Tesla, Serbian, here in the United States. And now I was reading last night, there was a German and a British person who also invented radio all within months of each other. And the debate is just who filed their patent papers first. But literally within 2 2 to 3 months, 4 different continents, no sharing at that time, no internet at that time. The idea was ripe. It was time for the concept of radio to hit human consciousness. It was— if we are vessels of code, if we are vessels of genes, that's when the ideas combined in a very powerful way, given the predecessors that came before. You had to understand a little bit about electricity and magnetism. They actually didn't understand much. Maxwell's equations were hotly debated at that point. They weren't even common curricula, let's say, if you were a double E equivalent of the day. And so it's a fascinating thing that you have that. Now, the books that I'm about to show you all sort of just stop there at this point, that, OK, every idea is a combination of new ideas. What I find interesting is that this might explain why you have technology-accelerated change, is that if you consider the set of ideas— so imagine the planet has a billion ideas. Kind of a strange number. Maybe it's a trillion. Maybe it's a quadrillion. I don't know. Some number n. As n grows, the number of groups you could form, possible pairwise or 3-way combinations of a set, Grows as something called Reed's Law. It's a 2 to the n sort of scaling law. It is the most powerful scaling law that I've ever seen anywhere close to a business phenomenon, meaning it dramatically outpaces things like network effects or Metcalfe's Law, which is if you sort of just look at how many nodes there are in a social graph, subgroup formation dominates all those in terms of scaling. And you wouldn't notice it at small n's. It's kind of like a weak phenomenon. It gets really powerful as the number of ideas grows. So if you think about the set of ideas growing, the possible permutations and recombinations grows exponentially just from a combinatorial explosion. And that— this economist, Brian Arthur of Santa Fe Institute, argues that's what creates the economy. It's not that it's exogenous to the economy. This is what creates all economic growth, in his opinion. Another writer, founding managing editor of Wired magazine, Kevin Kelly, who I love, also points out that ideas or inventions are not just things like a light bulb or a radio. It's also sometimes a process invention. And his point is, The scientific method, the concept of accumulating knowledge in a rigorous way with testable hypotheses and such, this is actually one of the biggest and most important inventions ever made. And it was almost a breakpoint in humanity's capacity to accumulate and recombine ideas because good ideas tended to be, in a sense, culled and— or the bad ideas were culled and the good ideas were recombined a bit more often than ideas that were shown to be less powerful in terms of their explanatory power. And then lastly, you've got to turn to the British for an easy-to-remember version of the same argument, something you could always remember at a cocktail party, which is this idea of ideas getting together and mating. So in simple redux, the idea is having sex. That is what it's all about. And that is hard to forget once you have that idea in your head. And there's some interesting side effects of all this, which is it explains partially this peculiar phenomenon in urban development that people are more inventive when they live in cities. The inventions per capita, inventions per person, goes up in a city. So if you have 1 million people living in a city, they will invent more stuff than 1 million people living in the countryside or living in suburbia. And it's intriguing because you could imagine the cafe of the mind, the cross-pollination of ideas, people getting together, kind of like this memeplex of modernity, this ability to be the pollinating vessels of ideas. If, again, if we're just vessels of ideas, it makes sense that that might happen. And that's good news because we just crossed the 50% point and there are going to be 500 new cities the size of New York built in the next 50 years. Or every existing city will have to take 3 times as many people as it currently has, which means about 4 to 5 times as much footprint, which is impossible for current cities. It also explains the power of interdisciplinary disruption. This is something we notice in universities. You may have felt it if any of you were in a science or engineering field at a university or interfacing with people who were, this is where interesting cross-pollination of ideas occurs. And if you imagine the segregation of ideas, their sort of divergence into systems or disciplines, and they have all their systems vernacular and people don't talk between each other, those are pools of ideas that were separated from one another. And then if you're the student that can cross between them, wow, that's where really amazing breakthroughs come through from. There's so many classic examples in history, from the deciphering of DNA structure to others, where it's someone from outside the field who makes the meaningful breakthroughs, often. Not a chemist thinking about chemistry, but let's say a geneticist and a computer scientist and an information theorist coming at a problem, combining ideas in new, interesting ways. So,
