PREDICTIONS – 10 Years Later - Santa Fe Institute

4. THE RISE AND FALL OF CREATIVITY
INNOVATION IN COMPUTER MAKING
The next step in my study was to consider the creativity, not of individuals,
but of a group of people linked together with a common goal,
interest, ability or affiliation; for example, a company or an organization.
The individuals now play the role of the cells in a multicellular
organism, and their assembly becomes the organism. The population in
its entirety, that is, the organization itself, can be seen as an individual.
The creativity of such an organization may therefore be expected to follow
S-curves in the same way as for individuals.
Back in the mid 1980s Alain Debecker and I studied the creative innovation
of computer companies. We looked at the number of new
models introduced by the nine largest computer manufacturers at the
time, and by plotting the number of different computer models a company
had to its credit, we obtained S-shaped innovation curves. For
Honeywell, one of the major manufacturers of mainframe computers,
we played the forecasters’ favorite game; namely, to ignore part of the
history and try to predict it. We fitted an S-curve on the data from the
time period 1958 to 1979, and by extrapolating it we obtained excellent
agreement with the data in the period 1979 to 1984. At the same time
we estimated fourteen models “missing” from the early part of the historical
period, probably representing unsuccessful attempts and
drawing-board ideas that never materialized. 7
A striking conclusion concerning most of the companies we studied
was that the fitted curves were approaching a ceiling, thus signifying
saturation of innovation and a decreasing rate in the fabrication of differentiated
new computer models. This result was disconcerting. The
computer industry was still young and innovation reflected on sales volumes.
The data used in our study ended in 1985, and the curves drawn
at that time implied that companies like Honeywell were in need of new
important technological breakthroughs to make possible the development
of fresh innovation waves. The ensuing exit of Honeywell from
the American computer industry (it was acquired by the French company
BULL) may have been symptomatic of the condition pointed out
in our analysis. But in any case, it was not long before the whole computer
industry began massive innovation with the launching of personal
computers.
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