- Renowned scientist Charles Darwin is famous
for his series about biological evolution.
Through the natural selection of small,
inherited variations, species change over time
so they can better compete, survive, and reproduce.
Really the core logic of innovation
comes also from biological evolution.
In more concrete terms, evolution is a result
of a three-step process repeated again and again and again.
The first step is creation of variety.
In a natural world, the offspring of people, animals,
or plants are never replicas of their parents.
They share some important similarities,
but are different in many other ways.
This variety makes things novel and drives innovation.
In Silicon Valley, we see this in a large variety of ideas
pursued by startups in each and every space,
medical devices, mobile gaming,
or artificial intelligence, you name it.
The second step is the brutal competition for survival.
Darwin famously called it "survival of the fittest".
For instance, the deforesters seeks out the weak saplings
so the stronger ones can benefit
from more sun, water, and nutrition.
In the ecosystem of Silicon Valley,
venture capitalists, that is VCs and consumers,
play a similar, merciless pruning role.
The top VCs invest in only about 10
out of 1,000 business plans they look at.
Of these 10, consumers weed out 9,
leaving only one that gets to live.
And the third step is amplification.
That is scaling up of the surviving genes.
As the survivors among the baby lions grow up,
the stronger ones get to mate more often
and spread their genes at a broader and a faster pace.
An identical process occurs in Silicon Valley.
Google killed off Intel ME, Ask Jeeves,
and other search engines
to become the place to go for internet search.
Facebook came to dominate Friendster, MySpace,
and other social media upstarts
to become the social media giant that we know today.
This three-step process, creation of variety,
brutal selection from among many options,
and scaling up of the best ideas,
is the core logic behind all innovation.
Each step is crucial and none can be side-stepped.
This three-step process must be repeated endlessly,
in nature or in innovation ecosystems
such as Silicon Valley.
This type of iteration happens spontaneously.
Not withstanding Google's massive success,
perhaps the best engineers are not the one work for Google.
Instead, they are the ones somewhere
in an unknown garage who are trying to upend Google.
If you are the leader of a company or a unit within it,
the implications are clear.
Ask yourself, what can my team and I do
to cultivate the logic of Silicon Valley inside my company?
What can we do to promote relentless experimentation
and the generation of new ideas?
How can we ensure that our biases
based on past experience
don't end up muzzling the best ideas
in favor of ones that appear safe,
but won't really help us change the rules of the game?
And how good are we at feeding and nurturing
the innovative ideas,
even though they may appear threatening
to people within the company?
As a wise man once said,
if you are not busy being reborn, you are busy dying.