What Makes an Innovation Revolutionary?

   What do you think of when you think of an innovation that changes the world? Or an idea that has the potential to change our everyday lives. Most of you may think an innovation is successful when all of a sudden an invention pops into someone's head and they have that sudden "eureka" moment. But when I finished Where Good Ideas Come From by Steven Johnson, I read how an innovation really pops into someone's head. "The premise that innovation prospers when ideas can serendipitously connect and recombine  with other ideas, when hunches can stumble across other hunches to successfully fill in the blanks [...]" (Pg 123). As one can see, Johnson states an innovation must overcome things such as error to become a platform and eventually part of a liquid network in society. Some innovations seem to have many exaptative parts to it, but what makes it revolutionary in the end is when those parts line up in a way that makes sense.

When an idea passes these stages, it displays to the public the adjacent possible, which shows both the potential and limitations of an innovation through a logical and creative standpoint. This is the true deciding factor of whether or not an innovation has the potential to change many lives or the way we think. Johnson talks about how these ideas can be defined as as "good ideas" on how they work in a surrounding area. Most successful innovations create platforms, which rises to a sector in which people can benefit through the idea. Johnson uses a beaver's dam as an example, due to the surrounding animals that can live there also. I would use Microsoft as an example because it's a company which gives jobs to people who find the company in their interest. All of these stages really define an innovation as a revolutionary idea. What do you think is going to be the next revolutionary idea? Is it going to mold lives and create a job sector? What's next to change this world?