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the lesson of human history is that economic growth springs from better recipes, not just from more cooking.

Ultimately, all increases in standards of living can be traced to discoveries of more valuable arrangements for the things in the earth’s crust and atmosphere… No amount of savings and investment, no policy of macroeconomic fine-tuning, no set of tax and spending incentives can generate sustained economic growth unless it is accompanied by the countless large and small discoveries that are required to create more value from a fixed set of natural resources. 

It is this combination, this injection of something new that is for Romer the engine of an idea’s value:

When a useful mixture is discovered… The discovery makes possible the creation of economic value. It lets us combine raw materials of low intrinsic value into mixtures that are far more valuable… In this fundamental sense, ideas make growth and development possible.

The plenitude of possibilities

The wonderful thing is that once one recognises the truth about the nature of ideas being new combinations, the resources at our disposal increase exponentially.

To appreciate the potential for discovery, we need only consider the possibility that an extremely small fraction of the vast number of possible mixtures available to us may be valuable.

To get a sense of the possibilities open to us, consider that a mere 10 building blocks or ingredients gives us 1013 combinations.  Twenty building blocks gives us 1,048,555 combinations. Forty gives us 1,099,511,627,735. And of course each of these new combinations in turn expands the number of building blocks to choose from. It really is exponential.

Of course, not all of these combinations will prove to be successful or desirable. Nonetheless as Brian Arthur reminds us, even if the chances are only one in a million that something useful will result, the possibilities still scale as (^2N-N-1)/1,000000. Or approximately 2^N-20. The possibilities – for newness, improvement, progress, surprise – are truly vast. In the words of Professor Romer, this is “combinatorial explosion.”

Perhaps a more simple example will suffice. All matter in the universe is constructed from just 92 elements.

Staying open

The chefs Ferran Adria of El Bulli, Heston Blumenthal of the restaurant The Fat Duck, Thomas Keller of the French Laundry and Per Se, and the writer Harold McGee are all at the forefront of what one might call the science of cooking – understanding the nature of ingredients, their interactions, and how cooking  processes work. In 2006 they put forward what they termed ‘the international agenda for great cooking’, and while its focus is food, it could well serve as the agenda and manifesto for anyone in the business of ideas and creativity:

We believe that today and in the future, a commitment to excellence requires openness to all resources that can help us give pleasure and meaning to people through the medium of food. In the past, cooks and their dishes were constrained by many factors: the limited availability of ingredients and ways of transforming them, limited understanding of cooking processes, and the necessarily narrow definitions and expectations embodied in local tradition. Today there are many fewer constraints, and tremendous potential for the progress of our craft. We can choose from the entire planet’s ingredients, cooking methods, and traditions, and draw on all of human knowledge, to explore what it is possible to do with food and the experience of eating.

This advocacy of openness to all the world’s resources, methods and traditions and of the drawing upon on all human knowledge is precisely what is at the heart of any creative enterprise, whether in a restaurant, a laboratory, studio, or an advertising agency.

Crucially, we can – whether as individuals or organizations – be purposeful and deliberate in our quest for inspiration, rather than leave it to chance. If we are interested in the broader world around us, if we engage with it actively, if we pursue passions and interests beyond the necessities and demands of the every day, we stand a better chance of developing something new and interesting.

Just as Ferran Adria, Heston Blumenthal, Thomas Keller and Harold McGee advocated an open-ness to all the world’s resources, the adman James Webb Young wrote of this need to be constantly accumulating raw material from the world to bring to bear upon the creation of ideas:

The process is something like that which takes place in the kaleidoscope… It has little pieces of coloured glass in it, and when these are viewed through a prism they reveal all sorts of geometrical patterns. Every turn of its crank shifts these bits of glass into a new relationship and reveals a new pattern. The mathematical possibilities of such new combinations in the kaleidoscope are enormous, and the greater number of pieces of glass in it the greater become the possibilities for new and striking combinations.

Feeding the kaleidoscope, ensuring that we increase the chances of ‘striking combinations’ at every turn is a powerful visualisation of how creativity requires stimulating and sustaining. The more we are open to the raw material that surrounds us, and the new creative possibilities that they carry, the greater the chance of something new arising.

//http://martinweigel.org/2012/08/27/why-creativity-is-like-cooking/

Constraints breed creativity

As media mature, their pace becomes not just a standard, but a helpful constraint that inspires further creativity.

Constraints have long inspired people who create, and the same is true for you and I. The limitations of the products we use every day inspire us: Twitter’s 140 characters; Instagram’s one photo at a time; or back in 2006, working within the range of code you could hack to make your MySpace page look unique.

Any network based around the concept of self-expression—the creation of personal data—will be more fun, easier to get started with, and more likely to create whole new genres of art if it includes limitations.

As easily as technology allows us to erase constraints, it gives us the power to create new ones.

Notable data

Like many, I believed that attention data was one of the most valuable types of data to collect when building an online service—because of its honesty. However, at Last.fm I learned that attention data is only valuable in aggregate. The “cold start” (when your profile is empty and recommendations are useless until you start scrobbling) was one of the biggest design challenges I dealt with. When the unit of data is so small, and created so passively, you must reach a tipping point before those single units add up enough that you can extract some value out of them for the user.

A unit of data like your current favorite song may not be as precise, but it’s a unit that carries a ton of human meaning. Asking someone what song they’ve been into lately is almost always a good conversation starter, and a lot can be inferred and asked about based on it. A favorite song is instantly valuable, and a handful of them can go a long way.

I’ve been calling this notable data. Knowing what song was the soundtrack to that summer, or why you’ll always want to wiggle to that guilty pleasure from the ‘90s, or which track you want played at your funeral, is a piece of personal data so weighty that if done right, it can create network value almost instantly. And its value is twofold: it’s not just that it’s more special; it’s scarce. How many favorite songs can one person have?

In the physical world, the scarcity of something, like a Stradivarius or Michael Jackson’s glove, is one of the driving factors of its value. Online, scarcity is almost a forgotten word. But maybe we just need to explore it in a different way?

Notable data starts to get really enticing when that single piece of data is crafted—contextualized with other pieces of data to make it even more valuable. It takes time, so it’s bound to happen less often. A Foursquare check-in with a tip has more value than just a check-in; an Instagram photo that’s been run through three different apps to get that perfect effect has more value than one that uses the standard filters, which still has more value than just a crappy camera phone pic.

Pace and value: an inverse relationship?

If scarcity breeds value, where can we find it online? Our time. In the virtual world, where we can make endless copies of data and “limited editions” don’t exist, the one thing that prevents us from doing even more than we already are is the limits of our brains (and our sanity).

When we pull down to refresh and find a little gem of digital craft—not just an automated personal stat or an off-the-cuff remark, but something that took time to make—it’s delightful. It’s valuable. But if these valuable, scarce things are slow, you may ask, won’t they always be niche? Like slow food and artisan coffee, a rounding error in a world of McDonald’s and Starbucks? Am I just some kind of internet hippie who thinks we all need to take a deep breath and slow down? No, there’s actually real value in this model. Let’s do the math, using This Is My Jam as an example:

Let’s assume you have a favorite radio station. Let’s also assume the most new music you can enjoyably consume in a day is an hour, tops. (Listening to all new music is exhausting; there’s a reason most radio stations play stuff you’ve heard before).

The average length of a pop song is 3.5 minutes, so you need about 17 songs for an hour of new music.

17 songs per day x 7 days per week = 119 new songs per week.

If 1 This Is My Jam user = 1 new song per week, you only need to follow 119 people for an hour of new, handpicked songs to listen to every single day. (My guess is there are also a lot of people who would be quite satisfied with only an hour of new music per week—which would require following 17 just people.)

When you compare that to the number of people you follow on Twitter or are friends with on Facebook, it’s probably not as many, or maybe just teetering in the same range. Yet even at this slow pace, it satisfies the use case of discovering new songs, because it’s a network that’s built around the right pace for music.

Go forth and explore the spectrum

In 1967, when describing the community of the future (our present), Marshall McLuhan predicted “electric circuitry has overthrown the regime of ‘time’ and ‘space’ and pours upon us instantly and continuously the concerns of all other men.” He was right; this is the real-time state we’re currently living in.

I believe it’s time to envision another community of the future—one slightly less dystopian than all information and media pouring down on our heads, whether it be night or day, whether it makes sense for that content to travel at high frequencies or not.

As the people who build this next vision of the future, we must consider pace.

If it helps, use analog metaphors to dream up limitations that help create that right pace. Experiment with speed. Try letting this drive the design principles of your work: If it should be at the fast end of the spectrum, how does this dictate how the data should be presented and delivered to the user? Likewise for the slow end of the spectrum: What’s the best context for your product? Twitchy pull-to-refresh data works well in your pocket, but what about for the best films your friends have watched this month?

If there is an exciting bit to the slow end of the spectrum, one that plays with scarcity and value, what do we have to lose by investigating it? I mean, the real-time world will always be there when we want it.

– Hannah Donovan (last.fm, this is my jam)

http://www.alistapart.com/articles/everything-in-its-right-pace/