Projects that look like toys, or activities that look like play, can generate valuable, serious outcomes. Protecting space for these, at both an individual and organisational level, is critical to innovation.
Toy projects have three advantages in nurturing new ideas:
It is easy to create wildly new prototypes because there are few external constraints from existing users, stakeholders and technologies. There is no need to design things in a general, robust way, or cope with change management or legacy requirements.
Andy Matuschak: Premature scaling can stunt system iteration
It is cheap to sustain toy projects because they have little scrutiny and therefore a low threshold of success. This allows more time to iterate in interesting ways before being forced to compromise and become self-supporting.
Unless you're a mad scientist tinkering with genetics, toy projects are unlikely to be subject to strong regulation, allowing more space for experimentation. In this way they are a type of 'permissionless innovation'.
Chris Dixon, partner at a16z, has a theory that the weekend hobbies of "the smartest people" pave the way for new businesses that reshape the economy, becoming the weekday jobs of everyone else. In trying to understand technology trends, knowing what is happening in groups like the Homebrew Computer Club may be more meaningful than knowing what is happening in, say, IBM Research. Of course, the trick is in identifying communities like the Homebrew Computer Clubs to begin with.
Chris Dixon - What the smartest people do on the weekend is what everyone else will do in ten years
Bolt Threads is an innovative biomaterials company working to synthesise spider silk among other materials. Rather than start with a high-performance application like military gear or pharmaceutical manufacturing, they deliberately started in the seemingly less-serious consumer apparel market, because its limited regulatory burden would give them more time runway to experiment and establish their extremely novel manufacturing methods.
Many companies have hackathons or hack weeks that probably don't need further explanation here. The nuance in effective organisations is probably in: (a) ensuring that staff also experiment with sub-"production quality" ideas outside of some restricted hack week; (b) identifying and carrying forward good ideas from each hack week, since the time bound creates a potentially harsh stopping point.
Simon Sarris collects a number of examples from debating societies, to Orville Wright tinkering with a printing press, to Walt Disney's free-wheeling studio environment.
Play as Deliberate Practice for Knowledge Work | Simon Sarris
In a different and more literal way, sometimes actual toys can turn out to drive valuable innovation. As a particular example I'm thinking of video game technology. nVidia's investment in GPU technology for gaming has helped to underpin rapid advances in serious machine learning because GPUs turn out to be well-adapted to ML computations. The Unity game engine is now being used in building construction to provide an augmented reality layer that allows for tighter iteration between the architect and contractors - a clear crossover from "bits to atoms". This is not exactly the same point as the more general "building toy versions of things", but illustrates that if some hypothetical innovation authority directed all efforts towards incremental progress on serious problems, we may miss a class of toy-shaped problems that actually deliver unexpected tech spillovers into the 'serious sectors'. This is covered more at:
Some books that touch on this:
Apple founders messed around with phone hacking:
https://twitter.com/visakanv/status/1113647429197357056?s=20
<aside> ⚙ Operationalise: Consciously build space into schedules for play; don't impose emotional limits on this time (e.g. "wasted time" / feeling productive); try to explore new spaces in this time. Don't emphasise note-taking on received wisdom.
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