Created: 2022-07-30 23:47
Innovation doesn’t happen in a vacuum, it is always based on previous work.
Newton used to said his achievements were only possible because he was standing On the shoulders of giants. A phrase he took from Bernard of Chartres.
On a big scale, like the lightbulb or electric vehicles, and a personal day-to-day scale, like Luhmann’s Zettelkasten, we could say that innovation is the composition of existing ideas to form new ones. Pretty much like atoms are combined to form molecules, which in turn are combined to form larger molecules, and so on.
The difference between that big scale and the personal day-to-day scale is that the former means changing history, while the later is about the innovations an individual makes to improve her own life, which might or might not be adopted by some others as well.
Reference: The problem with big innovations