PREDICTIONS – 10 Years Later - Santa Fe Institute

7. COMPETITION IS THE CREATOR AND THE REGULATOR
INNOVATIONS COME IN CLUSTERS
Number per decade
25
20
15
10
5
0
1700 1750 1800 1850 1900 1950
FIGURE 7.2 The data points represent the number of basic innovations per decade
according to Gerhard Mensch’s classification. A dramatic variation of the
number of innovations over time becomes evident even if the exact number of
innovations may be subject to debate. ∗
nurturing process, and in the spring its branches blossom in order to
produce the next crop. According to Marchetti, innovations in a social
system are analogous: The social system plays the role of the tree, and
the innovations that of its fruit. 5
Even though Mensch’s conclusion was corroborated by other classifications
of basic innovations, I still had reservations because of the subjective
element ingrained in procedures such as tabulating quantitatively two centuries’
worth of innovations. Yet the idea of clustering was appealing to me,
and its validity was reinforced when I came across a less subjective case in
which there was no room for ambiguity with regard to definitions, units, or
dates: the discovery of the stable chemical elements, a subject with
which I was intimately involved throughout my career as a physicist.
∗ Adapted from a graph by Gerhard Mensch in Stalemate in Technology: Innovations
Overcome the Depression (Cambridge, MA: Ballinger, 1979). Reprinted by permission
of the publisher. See also the German edition, Das techologische Patt (Frankfurt:
Umschau Verlag, 1975). The German edition is preferable for details on how the data
were selected.
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