Smarter Than You Think and how Innovation Creates Room for More Innovation

I picked up a book at the library the other day called Smarter Than You Think: How Technology Is Changing Our Minds for the Better, by Clive Thompson. For today's project, I read a chapter from it ("The Art Of Finding") that focused on how the growth of information technology from rote memorization to writing to printing to electronic storage, and how that development has changed how we think. There were a lot of useful takeaways about human thinking in general in this chapter – our tendency to store information outside our brains, whether it's on paper or in digital form or in the brain of another person – but a common theme jumped out at me as I read it that I felt was worthy of further exploration: the way that innovation can solve one unmet need but create a new one in the process.

The overall trend the chapter describes is the transition from internal storage to external: with the progression of technology, we've gradually chosen to retain fewer hard facts and instead shifted to remembering where the facts we want can be found. But what's interesting about that is that each transition came with its own opportunity for new innovation. When printing became widespread, the sheer volume of written material available to a serious reader became more than any single person could remember – even the book which any single fact could be found in was too much to recall, let alone what page it might be found on. So a sixteenth-century scholar named Jeremias Drexel began keeping notebooks whose only purpose was to record that information: he had created an index to solve a need that wasn't just unmet but which hadn't actually existed until print became widespread. Dewey extended the idea from a single person's knowledge to books as a whole when he created the Dewey Decimal system. Vannevar Bush envisioned the memex as a personalized index / record-keeper / searching tool: a mechanical aid customized to a single person. With each significant innovation that expands our capacity to store information, a new need is created: a greater capacity to organize and retrieve that information.

Having read this chapter and seen the pattern forming in it, I have started to see it elsewhere as well. Even in my group's project: the idea we eventually chose to run with is based on it. One great innovation (smart phones that are all-purpose communications devices / computers / phones / personal records-keepers) has become so useful and ubiquitous that it has become a primary target of thieves. That creates the need for a way to protect the phones from theft. And an opportunity for innovation is born!