Growth and Fitness through Innovation
How to augment the returns from your stake

© Klaus G. Saul

5. Use critical mass

This chapter is to familiarise the reader with the conditions of co-innovations respectively the follow-on processes which take advantage of critical masses that were generated in preceding innovations.

5-1
Having learned to identify the transitory paths that provide maximum stakeholder reward we might now go back to Schumpeter who in 1911 published a paper  {Schumpeter, J.A. (1911)} in which he addressed innovation as a re-enforced implementation and an improved recombination of prevailing subjects and forces [EXHIBIT 22]. This means that the real issue is not the generation of new input but to re-organisation of that input in order to improve the output.

5-2
Consequently the emphasis has to be on the output side. Indeed, there are many cases in which input is generated by preceding innovations. In these cases we are talking of "critical masses" which themselves are ready for further procession.

5-3
To elucidate the role of these "critical masses" we might recall the IKT story. We remember that Microsoft was recently able to rise its value on the stock exchange markets to the 500 billion US $ level after just having capitalised on the immense quantity of existing PC-hardware by means of its proper MS-software.

5-4
The triumph of the PC for its part started from the critical masses evolving from the development of the micro-processors. The critical mass of the successes with the micro processor was based on the preceding diode and transistor technology, while Bardeen, Brattain and Cooper could found their discoveries on patents and observations made by Julius Lilienthal, Georg Heil and A.H. Wilson of the years 1925-32 [Exhibit 23].

5-5
The "critical masses" must be regarded as raw material to be transformed into offers that meet unsatisfied desires of other people. They belong to the micro-level and are governed by the rules of the transition.

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