Kary Mullis won the 1993 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the development of the polymerase chain reaction (PCR), a now ubiquitous technique for replicating DNA sequences. When the idea first came to him on a nighttime drive in California, though, he almost dismissed it out of hand. As he recounted in his Nobel Award speech, “Somehow, I thought, it had to be an illusion...It was too easy… There was not a single unknown in the scheme. Every step involved had been done already.” “All” Mullis did was recombine well-understood techniques in biochemistry to generate a new one. And yet it’s obvious Mullis’s recombination is an enormously valuable one.
After examining many examples of invention, innovation, and technological progress, complexity scholar Brian Arthur became convinced that stories like the invention of PCR are the rule, not the exception. As he summarizes in his book The Nature of Technology, “To invent something is to find it in what previously exists.” Economist Paul Romer has argued forcefully in favor of this view, the so-called ‘new growth theory’ within economics, in order to distinguish it from perspectives like Gordon’s. Romer’s inherently optimistic theory stresses the importance of recombinant innovation.
Quirky, another Web-based startup, enlists people to participate in both phases of Weitzman’s recombinant innovation— first generating new ideas, then filtering them. It does this by harnessing the power of many eyeballs not only to come up with innovations but also to filter them and get them ready for market. Quirky seeks ideas for new consumer products from its crowd, and also relies on the crowd to vote on submissions, conduct research, suggest improvements, figure out how to name and brand the products, and drive sales. Quirky itself makes the final decisions about which products to launch and handles engineering, manufacturing, and distribution. It keeps 70 percent of all revenue made through its website and distributes the remaining 30 percent to all crowd members involved in the development effort; of this 30 percent, the person submitting the original idea gets 42 percent, those who help with pricing share 10 percent, those who contribute to naming share 5 percent, and so on. By the fall of 2012, Quirky had raised over $ 90 million in venture capital financing and had agreements to sell its products at several major retailers, including Target and Bed Bath & Beyond. One of its most successful products, a flexible electrical power strip called Pivot Power, sold more than 373 thousand units in less than two years and earned the crowd responsible for its development over $400,000.
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