It is well known that one of most important inventions of the modern era was the printing press in 1436 by Johannes Gutenberg. It is much less commonly known that an earlier version of the printing press had been invented 1,000 years earlier in Greece.
Looking at the history of any given invention, you’ll find that there were many sub-innovations by many different contributors that led up to the invention itself. Most inventions are actually the result of a cumulative process built upon layers of innovation.
So, why was Gutenberg’s printing press adopted by the masses when the earlier Greek version was not? For an innovation to take root in society, you need much more than the just the idea itself. Without key environmental factors to support the innovation, it will remain no more than an interesting idea. In his book Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (1997) Jared Diamond proposes four basic principles for an innovation to be exploited on a large scale:
Relative economic advantage compared with existing technology
“While wheels are very useful in modern industrial societies, that has not been so in some other societies. Ancient Native Mexicans invented wheeled vehicles with axles for use as toys, but not for transport. That seems incredible to us, until we reflect that ancient Mexicans lacked domestic animals to hitch to their wheeled vehicles, which therefore offered no advantage over human porters.”
Social value and prestige
“Millions of people today buy designer jeans for double the price of equally durable generic jeans – because the social cachet of the designer label counts for more than the extra cost.”
Compatibility with vested interests
The QWERTY keyboard was designed in 1873 to slow down typists.
“The reason behind all of those seemingly counterproductive features is that the typewriters of 1873 jammed if adjacent keys were struck in quick succession, so that manufacturers had to slow down typists. When improvements in typewriters eliminated the problem of jamming, trials in 1932 with an efficiently laid-out keyboard showed that it would let us double our typing speed and reduce our typing effort by 95 percent. But QWERTY keyboards were solidly entrenched by then. The vested interests of hundreds of millions of QWERTY typists, typing teachers, typewriter and computer salespeople, and manufacturers have crushed all moves toward keyboard efficiency for over 60-years.”
Ease with which their advantages can be observed
“In A.D. 1340, when firearms had not yet reached most of Europe, England’s earl of Derby and earl of Salisbury happened to be present in Spain at the battle of Tarifa, where Arabs used cannons against the Spaniards. Impressed by what they saw, the earls introduced cannons to the English army, which adopted them enthusiastically and already used them against French soldiers at the battle of Crecy six years later”
The differentiator then between ideas that become mainstream and those that don’t is rooted in these four basic requirements. What is interesting in our society today is that although rapid advancements in technology have increased our ability to innovate upon other ideas and concepts exponentially, the fundamentals of achieving an innovation that is sought-after by the masses remains the same. For example, innovations of the past such as big data, customer segments of one and artificial intelligence still need some fine-tuning before they can achieve mainstream adoption.
At Skura we have given birth to innovations in big data, predictive modeling and mobile computing for our next generation of products. Beyond that, what really sets us apart is that we understand that innovation must be born out of a desire make our technology relevant to our customers. Because as Jared Diamond shows us, the fate of any technological innovation rests greatly on the needs and expectations of the society it is introduced into.
