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While working on my thesis, one idea that I am playing with lately is understanding innovation as the combination of old things, or as Weick put it some time ago, “putting old things in new combinations and new things in old combinations” (1979: 252).  As children, we learn about the world by imitating others.  This imitation streak stays with us in the adult life. For instance, when travelling from one country to another, we adapt to new surroundings by imitating what the locals do.  From individual level of analysis, the same phenomenon of imitation can be transferred to the firm level by the force of analogy.  Many innovations in the business world originate as improved imitations, or borrowings, from other industries, smartly transformed and well-fitted to new environments.

Gutenberg, the inventor of the printing press, and an entrepreneur in his own right, provides a good example of this recombination, or bricolage, process.  Steven Johnson describes him thus in his “Where Good Ideas Come From” (2010: 152):

“Sometime around the year 1440, a young Rhineland entrepreneur began tinkering with the design of the wine press.  He was fresh from a disastrous business venture manufacturing small mirrors with supposedly magical healing powers, which he intended to sell to religious pilgrims (The scheme got derailed, in part by bubonic plague, which dramatically curtailed the number of pilgrims).  The failure of the trinket business proved fortuitous, however, as it sent the entrepreneur down a much more ambitious path.  He had immersed himself in the technology of Rhineland vintners, but Johannes Gutenberg was not interested in wine.  He was interested in words.

As many scholars have noted, Gutenberg’s printing press was a classic combinatorial innovation, more bricolage than break-through.  Each of the key elements that made it such a transformative machine–the movable type, the ink, the paper, and the press itself–had been developed separately well before Gutenberg printed his first Bible.  Movable type, for instance, had been independently conceived by a Chinese blacksmith named Pi Sheng four centuries before.  But the Chinese failed to adapt the technology for the mass production of texts, in large part because they imprinted the letterforms on the page by hand rubbing, which made the process only slightly more efficient than your average medieval scribe.  Thanks to his training as a goldsmith, Gutenberg made some brilliant modifications to the metallurgy behind the movable type system, but without the press itself, his meticulous lead fonts would have been useless for creating mass-produced Bibles.

It is clear that Gutenberg had no formal experience pressing grapes.  His radical breakthrough relied, instead, on the ubiquity of the screw press in Rhineland wine-making culture, and on his ability to reach out beyond his specific field of expertise and concoct new uses for an older technology.  He took a machine designed to get people drunk and turned it into an engine for mass communication.”
