What Is the Adjacent Possible?

Innovation often looks obvious after it happens.

Once we have smartphones, app stores seem like a natural next step. Once we have personal computers, computer mice and mouse pads seem obvious. Once radio transmission exists, it seems obvious that a metal object might serve as an antenna.

But before those things existed, the path was not obvious. It was not simply waiting on a shelf.

The adjacent possible is Stuart Kauffman’s term for the set of next-step possibilities that become available from where we already are. At any moment, society has a stock of tools, skills, materials, organizations, habits, and knowledge. Some new combinations are close enough to be tried. Others are still out of reach. When one new combination succeeds, it changes the frontier. It makes other combinations possible.

That is the basic insight: new things open the door to more new things.

Kauffman developed the concept in biology and complex-systems theory, but it is also useful for thinking about technological and economic change. In the economy, the adjacent possible is not a fixed menu of options. It changes as people invent, adapt, recombine, and repurpose what already exists.

A long tradition in economics treats innovation as recombination: existing things are modified, joined, adapted, and repurposed to create new things. Joseph Schumpeter described innovation as “new combinations.” Brian Arthur developed a theory of technology in which invention comes from combining existing pieces to solve problems Roger Koppl, Stuart Kauffman, and their coauthors extend this tradition in work on Creative Dynamics and technological evolution.

Kauffman’s screwdriver illustration captures the idea vividly.

A screwdriver has an indefinite number of possible uses. It can drive screws. It can pry open a paint can. It can scrape something off a surface. It can prop open a window. It can serve as a makeshift tool in countless unplanned situations.

But the possible uses of a screwdriver are not fixed forever. They change as the rest of the world changes.

Before radio transmission existed, a screwdriver could not be used as a radio antenna. That use was not yet in the adjacent possible. Once radio existed, however, an old object acquired a new possible use. The screwdriver did not change. The world around it changed.

That is why the example matters. We cannot list all the future uses of the objects around us because we do not know all the future technologies, institutions, and problems that will make those uses meaningful. The economic “phase space,” to use the language of Creative Dynamics, is not stable. The list of relevant goods, uses, actions, and opportunities changes as novelty arrives.

I explored this idea in my 2021 article, Creative Dynamics and Entangled Political Economy. The article links Creative Dynamics with Entangled Political Economy, two approaches that share a skepticism toward treating the economy as a machine that can be fully modeled, predicted, and controlled from the outside. Both approaches begin from a different premise: social life is open-ended. Knowledge is dispersed. Institutions shape what people are able to discover. And the future is built through processes no one fully sees in advance.

The adjacent possible helps us see why innovation is so difficult to predict. A new technology does not merely solve one problem. It becomes a building block. It changes what other people can try. It creates new uses for old things, new problems for entrepreneurs to solve, and new niches for future goods and services.

Consider mouse pads. There was no meaningful market for mouse pads in 1870. There was not much of a market for them in 1970 either. But once personal computers with graphical interfaces and computer mice entered ordinary households, a niche for mouse pads opened. A new good created a new potential market, which created opportunities for further goods. The economic-niche literature helps explain how this process works.

This is how innovation often works. New goods create new possibilities. Those possibilities create still more possibilities. The frontier does not move in a straight line. It branches.

The adjacent possible reminds us that the future is not just a menu from which society chooses. The menu itself changes. It is built, step by step, through experimentation.