Origin of the Innovation Trajectory

This chapter explains how innovation commons work, in terms of the mechanisms of entrepreneurial discovery through institutions to pool information, and what specific problems they solve in order to discover entrepreneurial opportunities. It introduces the proto-entrepreneurs in the innovation commons, who are people exploring a new technology but who have not yet figured out the entrepreneurial opportunity. It introduces the dual-discovery problem, which is the problem of finding the people who will pool ideas into the innovation commons as well as the problem of finding the entrepreneurial opportunity. And this chapter also introduces the concept of the fundamental transformation, which is the institutional transformation when the innovation commons collapses in its extant form (although many institutional pathways are possible from this point onwards). It defines the innovation commons analytically as a higher-order discovery mechanism in institutional space.