Citizen Sector

In "The Evolving Web of Future Wealth" Stuart Kauffman, Stefan Thurner and Rudolf Hanel outline new thinking around innovation in economics borrowing heavily from evolutionary concepts of novelty and pre-adaptation. While novelty by its very nature makes mute discussion about how novelty comes about, it does beg the question how might one identify it when it does. Identifying the potential behind an innovation is not only a function of its intended purpose, but also a function of its potential unintended applications. While this of course is not true novelty or pre-adaptation, those concepts can create a metaphor for examining an objects potential. As children we constantly grapple with the gap between objects or sounds understood purpose and their intended purpose. Pots "become" drums, spoons drum sticks. It seems however, as we age that we assume, to greater and greater degrees, that objects' intended purposes are their only purposes; we express more aspects of "Functional Fixedness" This attention to intent is often entirely correct based on an object's usefulness, but not always.

Reflecting on Beinhocker's "design space" concepts, I would argue that for objects there is a "application space." The "application space" represents all the things one could do with a product. Rather than all the possible products that could be made from a set of raw material, this approach would explore all the possible uses of a created products. If one examined raw materials all the possible products that could be made could be considered their "design space." This creates an almost impossible number of products to examine. However, moving one step up, if we considered the "application space" all the possible uses of products produced we can define a much smaller space, and one that introduces the concept of usefulness. Usefulness is almost a synonym for value, and like value contextually dependent. Nonetheless, it appears that value potential is created by both the intended and unintended potentials of a given product. Kauffman goes on to argue that combination of products creates value that may be impossible to understand via traditional mathematical methods.

What does this mean for business? From a user design perspective, in addition to a deep understanding of a product intended purpose, we should ask ourselves the simple question, "What else might someone do with this product?

“What mathematical framework would allow us to say that the screw works complementarily with the screwdriver to create value? What algorithmic model can describe unforeseeable Darwinian preadaptations in the economy? There may be none." –Stuart Kauffman