Innovation: For the Light Bulb There Was No Light Bulb Moment

Everyone in the public sector is looking for innovation, but where should we look?

The ‘adjacent possible’  sounds like a dreadful bit of jargon, but actually means exactly what it says.   It describes the place at the boundary between what we do now and an imaginable but as yet unachievable future. 

To take an illustration, Homo sapiens evolved about two hundred thousand years before the light bulb was invented.  Now, the light bulb would undoubtedly have been a particularly useful tool for our ancestors who spent a lot time in caves.  If the brains of Stone Age men were identical to ours, why didn’t they come up with the light-bulb?

The answer seems fairly obvious.  In order to build a light bulb, humans first had to understand electricity, that it existed and what it was, then how to harness it and then how to generate it at will.   Actually making a light bulb then depends upon knowledge and skill in a wide range of difficult technological processes – the ability to construct small, air tight glass vessels and fill them with gas, skills in making delicate metal filaments and so on. 

For the light bulb, Michael Faraday’s experiments in generating electricity in the 1820s and 1830s provided the spark for a period of innovation. In the space of twenty years in the mid nineteenth century, several different working versions of a light bulb were produced and a few were developed into models that could be mass-produced.  At last, probably a few hundred millennia after a human being first thought ‘Hey, wouldn’t it be cool if……’ ,  we reached the point where we could flick a switch and instantaneously light up a dark space.

This week, when the last typewriter was manufactured in the UK, it emerged that the first patent for a typewriter was filed in 1714, a full hundred and fifty years before someone managed to build one.  A similar story can be told for the computer. 

The lesson is that both the light bulb and the typewriter had to move into the adjacent possible before they became reality.

The adjacent possible is easiest to describe in terms of science and technology- things we can see- but it applies to everything, not least culture, ideas and (importantly for innovation in the public sector) politics.  

The notion of the adjacent possible is one of those simple and seemingly obvious ideas that turns out also to be more useful than it first appears. The more you think about it, the more you realise how useful it is.

For example, when looking for innovation it is vital to understand the adjacent possible.  The chap who envisioned the typewriter in the early years of the eighteenth century did a service to mankind, but was no help to anyone in 1714.  The experimenters and theorists who preceded Faraday set the foundations for what he achieved in the field of electro-magnetism, but the invention of the light bulb still had to wait.  

In a crisis, then, there is no point spending a lot of time looking for innovation in the space beyond the adjacent possible, but perhaps there is real innovation to be found in the space that last year was outside the adjacent possible and this year is within it.   What are the new things that make it possible to do things we couldn’t do before?

Because the adjacent possible – and our understanding of it- changes all the time.  Sometimes it is changed for us by a moment of individual genius as with Faraday’s experiment,  or it may be changed by collective effort over time as with much cultural change.   The consecration of women bishops into the Church of England, for example, while it has been moved closer, is still just outside the adjacent possible but with one further push – a change of governance or a new argument perhaps- it will surely move into that space before long.

Innovators need to understand how much they can influence the adjacent possible in the short term, a particularly interesting question when it comes to persuading politicians, who may have been elected on a clear manifesto to do one thing, that perhaps the innovative solution to their problem depends upon pursuing a different course. 

The lesson is that innovation can only be accomplished using the tools and resources that exist.   Once again, this indicates that true innovation rarely emerges from a light bulb moment of inspiration, but from hard graft- understanding the difference between what is out there and what is interesting but as yet tantalisingly beyond use.