Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Patrick J. Howie (Maple Glen, PA) has spent two decades studying the social process of innovation as an economist, head of product development for a venture capital-backed start-up, and as creator of the social prediction website ABetterGuess.com. His work has been cited and published in numerous publications including Forbes, Fortune, Business Week, and the Wall Street Journal. Patrick holds a patent for A Unique Method and System of Analyzing the Effectiveness of Marketing Strategies.

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THE EVOLUTION OF REVOLUTIONS

Prometheus Books

Contents

FOREWORD..........................................................9INTRODUCTION: A REVOLUTIONARY BOOK................................13Chapter 1: The World Wide Web Phenomenon..........................23Chapter 2: The Innovation Process.................................49Chapter 3: The Relativity Revolution..............................71Chapter 4: The Nature of Innovation...............................91Chapter 5: The Democratic Revolution..............................121Chapter 6: From Innovation to Revolution..........................143Chapter 7: Emergent Properties of Revolutions.....................167Chapter 8: Predicting Innovation Adoption.........................191Chapter 9: The Universal Constant.................................209NOTES.............................................................225INDEX.............................................................243

Introduction

"This makes a lot of sense ... at least on paper" —a blogger's assessment of electronic books

Paper or Electronic? Did you know that by the very act of reading this book you are helping to shape a revolution?

The electronic book or, more precisely, the electronic book reader nudged its way into the public consciousness in the 2009 holiday season. To the general public, the e-reader was no longer that obscure toy they heard about at cocktail parties. The Amazon Kindle was entering its third holiday season, and the buzz surrounding the early 2010 release of the Apple iPad reached near-deafening levels. While the e-reader was still a product for those ahead of the curve, much like flat-screen televisions were a few years before, more and more people started to consider owning one.

The holiday season proved to be successful, at least according to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, who triumphantly claimed that the Amazon Kindle was "the most gifted" item in Amazon's history and that sales of e-books outstripped sales of regular books on Christmas day. Just over a month later, the Wad was officially introduced to the world, although it took another three months before it was actually available for purchase. Apple reported over 300,000 sales of the Wad on the first day alone and over 250,000 books purchased from the Apple iBook store within the first few days.

Despite this heightened fanfare, the e-book and the e-reader have a long and storied history. The first e-books were produced by the nonprofit organization Project Gutenberg all the way back in 1971 with the simple mission "to encourage the creation and distribution of eBooks." The e-book received a boost in 2000 when Stephen King made his new book, Riding the Bullet, available in electronic form only.' Shortly before King's release, thirty-two organizations representing the publishing and technology industries teamed up to develop e-book standards.

The e-book community noted that the computer was not perfectly suited for book reading since the computer, even the laptop, was not light and portable enough for most reading, not to mention that the text was difficult to read. Recognizing a need, numerous companies developed e-readers in the early part of the decade. Midway through the decade, the big boys joined the party as Sony launched its first e-reader to much fanfare in 2006 and Amazon launched the first Kindle in November of 2007. Apparently unprepared for the pent-up demand, the Kindle sold out in one day and was out of stock for the next five months. Despite this setback, first-year sales of Kindles were actually larger than first-year sales of Apple's iPod.

Although "traditional" books still dominate the market, all the signs indicate that the publishing industry is in the early stages of a revolution. This revolution will extend well beyond the mere replacing of paper with electrons as the technology will continue to develop into areas that we can only imagine today. This revolution will also fundamentally alter the publishing industry, as the balance of power across publishers and with authors will change radically. How and when this revolution takes place depends, in part, on how you-the reader and consumer-respond to these developments.

This book will explore how innovations develop and what must transpire for an innovation to create a revolution. Along the way we will explode some of the myths about innovation and revolutions, namely, that innovations occur as a result of the superhuman abilities of individuals or that revolutions occur in a single great leap. In their place, this book will demonstrate how innovations and revolutions are social phenomena that require overcoming many powerful psychological and communal forces.

* * *

Creative destruction is the process by which new ideas, businesses, and industries emerge and therefore lead to the downfall of traditional ideas, businesses, and industries. It is a revolutionary process. A revolution is not just a political event, for revolutions occur in all areas, whether in business, politics, or science, but the revolutionary process for all areas is the same. Revolutions represent a long process—from the initial innovation to the dramatic revolutionary period, through the long postrevolutionary adjustment. At its core, this book is about understanding the process of innovation and how a new idea, product, or service spreads throughout a social system to cause a revolution. The goal here is to enable the reader to identify or create revolutions as well as to capitalize on the effects of revolutions.

This is a business book, but it is not about business. It takes a wide-angle view of innovation as a social phenomenon rather than a narrow view of its being exclusively a business innovation. But this book does adopt an important element from the traditional business model of learning, the case study. I have evaluated over two dozen revolutions, most of which will be discussed throughout the book. But three will be discussed in detail, both to highlight the universal nature of the process of innovation and change, regardless of the subject matter, as well as to bring together a unified way of looking at the revolutionary process across the political, scientific, and economic spheres. What you will find is that the process of innovation and change is surprisingly similar across all these seemingly distinct fields.

Rather than pull some specific case studies only from industry, however, we will focus on three of the largest forces that have shaped, and that continue to shape, our world and culture: the democratic revolution that began with the American Revolution, the relativity revolution that took hold through Albert Einstein's theories, and the seemingly rapid emergence of the World Wide Web as the dominant social force of our time. These case studies have been chosen not only because they represent fascinating stories and highlight facts that may surprise many. They have been chosen because among their many similarities is the fact that the common view of each story is wrong.

For example, the idea that each of these revolutions was the work of a single act of genius or reflected a dramatic leap forward in thinking is an unfortunate oversimplification. Each of these...