💡 I'd done an analysis of the DNA of innovation a few years ago, with an exhaustive list of innovations over the years as the data source. It's a piece of work I'm inordinately proud of! A

The thesis was, innovation comes from recombination of ideas, and recombination of ideas requires, simply put, progress in multiple fields to happen and cross-pollinate. This is hard at the beginning, there's so much to do!

Consider a wheelbarrow. Can't build one before wheels or axles. Or ball bearings. Or knives to whittle down hard wood. Or the ability create joints to connect pieces of wood together. Or domesticate an animal who can drag it, ideally. Or ability to collaborate to build it. Or ...

Even simple ideas require large amounts of effort to make them real. And that's how innovation happens, recombinations with flashes of inspiration of what can now be done! Explore the adjacent possible.

Now though, once we have simultaneous progress over large numbers of fields, we get the opposite problem too! Cross-pollination becomes hard. Every field is a sub-field which needs a decade of study, so how do you transfer knowledge easily? Surely we'd hit a new equilibria until something shifts (as now?)

"And when we’re weighed down by the burden of knowledge, the capacity for free problem solving is more under pressure, and we have less time and focus to innovate."

Much more in the essay, including a discussion on the network effects of how cross-pollination was held back before, how "comms technologies" like paper, books, writing, ink, or software helped increase the speed of diffusion, and (topically relevant) how population actually helps innovation flourish.