Musings on Entrepreneurship and Innovation
Wednesday, January 03, 2007Desperation is the Mother of Innovation
I'm reading a new book by Read Montague, a brain scientist. The following passage caught my attention, because it rings true:
It has been said about Darwin's theory of evolution that it's the ultimate tautology - the survivors survive...whatever works to keep you alive and get your genes into the next generation is just fine...But there is another feature of survival that is often not emphasized so much - survival is hard, desperately hard...Out of the pressure of desperation comes efficiency. We all know that we become much more efficient and creative when we are desperate - when circumstances dictate that we absolutely must find some solution to a problem even though time and money have almost run out. Desperation is indeed the mother of invention.
The adaptive capacity of a business is a measure of the speed at which it can identify and climb higher on a constantly shifting fitness landscape. Alternatively, adaptive capacity means a firm's capacity to innovate over time. Ironically, three things happen to most firms as they become successful - that is, as they climb a fitness peak:
- Climbing yet higher becomes exponentially more difficult
- People become comfortable with their apparent success
- Accumulations attract parasites (see agency risk and kleptocracy)
The historical record suggests that large firms are no more adaptive than small firms. That is, the chances of survival from year-to-year don't increase much as firm size increases. In a competitive and dynamic environment, maybe the loss of desperation is deadly.
