Why Does Innovation Take Time?

For all the technological developments we humans are seeing every single day, and at an accelerated pace at that, too, I cannot help but feel… frustrated. I want it to happen faster. I want to be blown out of my mind constantly. Why does technological advancement take time and effort? Why doesn't it happen “automatically”?

According to Kirby Ferguson, creativity is the result of a combination of copying, transforming, and combining existing ideas. If this is to be true than perhaps we should approach innovation, technological and social advancement in a more systematic way. A systematic approach to innovation. Where new ideas are automatically birthed into reality by a machine, by a system that copies, transforms, and combines existing ideas.

Take arithmetic operations for an analogy. Addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. We start out with 2 numbers. Let’s go with 2 and 3. We use this operation called addition, and we get a new number called 5. Cool. Let’s try subtracting. We could subtract 2 from 3 and get -1, or we could do it the other way around and get 1. We could try multiplying 2 and 3 to get 6. We could also try dividing; 2 divided by 3 would yield 2/3, 3 divided by 2 would net 3/2. With merely 4 types of mathematical operations we've expanded our group of numbers substantially. We started out with 2 and 3. One level deep and we already have 2, 3, 5, -1, 1, 6, 2/3, 3/2. On the way we've even discovered a new type of number, a number that seems to be quite different from what we originally started out with. Why stop at level one. We can do more operations this time with a bigger group of numbers at our disposal. We could do this for an infinite amount of time resulting in infinite amounts of new numbers. We can keep expanding our pool of numbers. Faster and faster our number pool would grow. Oh, how proud we would be.

Like arithmetic operations perhaps we can have operators for innovation. Innovative operations. Instead of numbers we start with ideas, memes. We “add, subtract, multiply, divide” ideas with these so called “innovation operators”. Oh, how fast our pool of ideas would grow! Imagine that. A systematic method to innovating. A system, a machine that churns out “ideas” at an unfathomable rate.