The Plenitude and innovation

I’ve just quickly re-read The Plenitude by Rich Gold while researching something. It’s a lovely little book about the “…dense, knotted ecology of human-made stuff ‘the Plenitude’”. But for now here are some dog-eared passages I picked out about creativity and innovation.

On creativity…
p.5 “In this context, creativity is not just making things (factories do that), it’s creating new things, things that have never existed before.” and also p.54 “…I don’t mean that stuff has to be physical. It could be an idea, or a concept, or a string of words.”

On problem solving, engineering and design (try to ignore the “hats”)…
p.25 “The hat of engineering is close related to the hat of design. Both work from need and desire. Both are concerned primarily with the user and the world - the “real world”, as they like to say. Unfortunately, in most companies design is pitted against engineering, a battle that tends to reduce the effectiveness of both. I think this is caused by a misunderstanding by both engineers and management, who see the hat of design as the hat of art. They think that designers work from inner vision and not problem solving.”

Chapter 3, on the seven patterns of innovation…

1. “Necessity is the mother of invention. Find a problem and solve it.”


2. “It’s a thing of genius. I had a vision and just had to do it.”


3. “The Big Kahuna. Scientific deduction of stuff from 1st principles.”


4. “The future exists. We just have to intersect it at the perfect moment.”


5. “Colonization. Find the unowned; package it; sell it back.”


6. “Stuff desires to be better stuff. Humans are how stuff makes more stuff.”


7. “Change the definition. Language and metaphor create/are the world.”

Which includes this on corporate R&D…
p.38 “A company can build too much of an ivory tower. While visions don’t flow directly from problems, they often grow, like a pearl, from an irritating grain of sand.”

On naming and defining things…
p.48 “The seventh pattern, Change the Definition, is the one that designers often invoke when they work on corporate identity construction […] These changes allow their respective companies to innovate in new areas, to develop and create in new ways, to behave differently. In a very real sense it changes the frame of imaginable invention.” and p.49 “The definition of a product (the product genre) determines to a large degree what it can and cannot be. It sets up the frame of expectations, not just for the customer but for the producer as well.”

On how we need to innovate…
p.55 “And since we can’t make what others are making - by law and by the law of the marketplace - it is only through creativity and innovation that we survive.”

And I’ll finish off with a couple of passages that are not so much on these themes, but that I found liked.

On brands and nature…
p.63 “There are differences between the bio-Plenitude and the stuff-Plenitude. As far as I know there is nothing quite like brands in nature.”

And on the fractal nature of stuff…
p.67 “I once asked Hal Varian, the economist, how much stuff is there in one room? “Well, what’s the definition of a piece of stuff?,” he asked. “How about: something that was individually designed, shipped, marketed, and sold,” I replied. “OK,” he said, “then there is no answer, for stuff is fractal.”“

On a final note, there’s a companion autobiographical PDF which is well worth reading alongside the book.