Ingenuism: A New Theory of Innovation

A new era of innovation?

When COVID-19 hit, a disturbing fact loomed: historically, it has taken more than a decade on average to develop new vaccines. What most people didn’t learn until late 2020 was that cutting-edge mRNA technology had enabled scientists to develop an effective vaccine, not in decades or even years, but in two days.

This is only one striking example of the rapid innovation we’ve seen in the 21st century:

• We’ve gone from dusty libraries to the ability to access the entire wealth of human knowledge with a few keystrokes (or a voice command).

• We’ve gone from landlines and email to the ability to stay in touch with everyone we’ve ever met and many people we haven’t through social media platforms like Facebook and video conferencing technologies like Zoom.

• We’ve gone from local stores housing thousands of products to the ability to order almost any product at the push of a button.

• We’ve gone from a server in every office to centralized cloud-based services like AWS that make it easy and affordable to start and scale a business.

Innovation drives progress. For most of human history, a transformational invention would show up every few centuries. As a result, progress was slow and erratic. Living standards fell almost as often as they rose. Consistent progress first began in the mid-1600s and then accelerated in the mid-19th century and then again in the mid-20th century. Today, the world at the end of someone’s life looks little like the world they grew up in.

Consider economic growth over the past 500 years:

Source: https://ourworldindata.org/economic-growth

This real increase (adjusted for inflation) is astonishing. And such progress extends well beyond economic growth. We are living longer and healthier lives, thanks to improvements in areas such as sanitation, medicine, and safety. Admittedly, continuing challenges remain, from extreme poverty in parts of the world to the impact of rising CO2. The good news is that if we turn our ingenuity toward these challenges, we can expect the same remarkable progress that we’ve seen in health, wealth, and countless other areas. There is no question that the world has overall become a much better place for human beings.

And there are clear signs that 21st century has the potential to dwarf the progress of the past. The most astonishing story of the last two decades is one that few are talking about: young technology firms are creating unmatched wealth at unprecedented speed.

Consider the performance of seven leading tech companies over the last 20 years:

None of these firms resemble what they were 20 years ago. Two didn’t even exist! Apple’s value alone has grown 46,000%. Apple’s current success (market value over 10% of US GDP, 1.6% of global GDP) dominates even IBM in its 1970 heyday (3.7% and 1.3%). And Apple has peers who are producing similarly extraordinary results. As a group these seven companies created $7 trillion of market value, roughly the combined GDP of Germany and the United Kingdom, in less time than it takes a new baby to become an adult (or at least be able to buy beer). And that doesn’t come close to capturing the full value of their work to consumers: indeed, many of their products are free.

We live in a unique time with unprecedented opportunity. But to harness it, we need to understand the forces that drive progress—and that have made 21st century innovation so extraordinary.

Ingenuism 101

We believe that the basic source of innovation is human ingenuity—the process of using creative thinking to solve productive challenges.

It takes only a brief glance at history and the world today to know that ingenuity does not thrive in all environments. We know that Silicon Valley has flourished while the Rust Belt has floundered. We know the most innovative companies come from the US and not from Europe. We know that South Koreans enjoy abundance while North Koreans are trapped in a modern Dark Age. And we know that innovation as a way of life did not arise until the actual Dark Ages were displaced by the Enlightenment.

To benefit from ingenuity, we need to understand the conditions that allow it to function, generate new ideas, and solve challenging problems. Such a project includes but goes beyond understanding which political policies that impact ingenuity and innovation for better and for worse. To build a world that produces innovation at the speed of thought, we need to know:

• What enables an individual to cultivate and exercise ingenuity in his or her life and work

• How sharing knowledge and combining skills accelerates the pace and impact of innovation

• What distinguishes innovative organizations from lethargic ones

• What cultural factors encourage and support ingenuity and which strangle creativity and ambition

The 19th and 20th centuries offer crucial insight into these questions. They show us that the freedom to think, without being straitjacketed by political and religious authorities, is a precondition of innovation. New ideas must be explored, with good ideas thriving and bad ideas allowed to fail. And those centuries show us how augmenting physical labor with machine labor liberates our time. For the first time most people were no longer bound to the farm 12 hours a day just to survive. People with the opportunity to think and dream up new ideas began to build the modern world.

But the 21st century has begun to show us more. It shows us what’s possible when machines augment not just our physical labor but much of our mental labor. It shows us the benefits of global connection, benefits that go beyond specialization and global markets, but include a world where 7 billion minds can collaborate to invent and solve vital problems. It shows us how rapidly we can advance when progress is constrained only by the speed of our aggregate ingenuity.

A COVID-19 vaccine was created in days because a German company founded by children of Turkish immigrants teamed up with an American multinational and cost-effectively leveraged powerful computers and knowledge from scientists around the globe.  

That is the phenomenon Ingenuism seeks to understand and encourage.

Ingenuism is a new economic framework which holds that progress derives from ingenuity supported by the core principles of connection, exploration, and environment.

• Connection is the ability for people to observe and learn from other people’s ideas and insights, and to collaborate in ways that generate better ideas and insights.

• Exploration is our ability to test out ideas and engage in trial-and-error learning.

• Environment is a culture (and legal framework) that not only allows for but encourages exploration, connection, and iterative learning.

When we get connection and exploration in a supportive environment, the result is rapid innovation, value creation, and progress.

That’s why the 21st century has been different. The Internet and globalization unleashed unprecedented connection and exploration, which could flourish in supportive environments created by expanding freedom in many parts of the world.

What to expect

To solve the world’s most pressing problems and build a flourishing future requires understanding the principles of Ingenuism—how they explain the past and lay the groundwork for building the future. That includes questions like:

• How do modern tools and ideas empower the connection and collaboration that supercharges developing and deploying new ideas?

• What explains Silicon Valley’s success, and how can we apply those lessons to other industries, parts of the country, and parts of the world?

• How do we address legitimate concerns about new technologies without allowing fear of change to suppress ingenuity and progress?

This is not an academic enterprise. We also want to see this knowledge translated into action so that people:

1. Practice ingenuity and apply it in their lives and careers every day.

2. Foster ingenuity by creating organizations with cultures that support exploration and progress through iterative learning.

3. Liberate ingenuity by demanding political policies that unleash innovators to solve our crucial problems.

4. Celebrate ingenuity by recognizing and acknowledging those who spearhead human progress.

Our primary outlet will be our weekly Substack newsletter, which will be free for the foreseeable future. We will share our latest thinking as well as point to our more in-depth work, including the intellectual foundation of Ingenuism, regular essays, and a podcast with leading thinkers and innovators.

We are living in an era of incredible innovation and advancement, but so much more is possible. There is no reason we can’t live in a world of widespread abundance, high-speed travel, rapidly increasing lifespans, low-cost housing, low-cost energy, high-quality education, customized-everything, and rising wages that make today’s rich seem poor.

The future can be amazing. But this future isn’t something that happens to us—it is something we make happen. That starts with doing the opposite of taking innovation for granted.  Here we will be exploring the power of ingenuity and putting those lessons into practice.

If you want to join us in that cause, please take a moment to subscribe to our Substack newsletter at ingenuism.com.