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The Adjacent Possible

Innovation happens at the edges of what exists

Sprout · developing Updated Jul 19, 2026 3 min read
innovationemergencecreativity
Alexander Graham Bell's telephone patent drawing
Bell filed a patent application on February 14, 1876; Gray filed a caveat

Stuart Kauffman introduced the adjacent possible in The Origins of Order in 1993.1 In his account of evolving systems, each new part changes the set of combinations available next.

Applied to invention, the idea becomes a model: a new tool depends on some mix of prior tools, knowledge, materials, institutions, and demand. What is easy to try changes as those conditions change.

The model offers one way to read multiple discovery. It does not prove that every invention arrives when history makes it inevitable.

On February 14, 1876, Alexander Graham Bell filed a patent application for the telephone. Elisha Gray filed a caveat that day, a notice of work that might lead to a later application. Bell’s patent issued on March 7.2

In 1858, Charles Darwin was partway through a long manuscript on species when Alfred Russel Wallace sent him an essay with a similar mechanism of natural selection. Their accounts overlapped but were not identical. Darwin then set the longer work aside and wrote the shorter On the Origin of Species.3

William Ogburn and Dorothy Thomas listed 148 cases of multiple invention or discovery in 1922.4 Robert Merton discussed 264 “multiples” in 1961.5 Lists can show that multiple discovery occurs. They cannot by themselves show why each case occurred or that no other path was possible.

The internet depended on digital computers, communications networks, packet-switching research, standards, public funding, and many other choices. That history is not one necessary chain. Technologies can use several precursor paths, and useful parts can exist long before institutions connect them.

The adjacent possible is most useful as a question:

  • Which part became cheap, known, or legal?
  • Which new combination can now be tested?
  • Which social barrier still blocks it?
  • Which old technique could be recovered rather than invented?

New parts can open options, close options, or leave them unused. Chance, power, path dependence, and lost knowledge all shape what comes next. “Adjacent” describes a constraint, not a command.

Go Deeper

Books

  • Where Good Ideas Come From by Steven Johnson — Popularizes Kauffman’s concept for general audiences. Liquid networks, slow hunches, serendipity.
  • The Origins of Order by Stuart Kauffman — The 1993 origin. Technical, aimed at biologists and complexity scientists.
  • At Home in the Universe by Stuart Kauffman — More accessible Kauffman on self-organization.

Essays

  • Steven Johnson’s Substack newsletter is literally called “Adjacent Possible” — ongoing exploration of the concept.

Sources

  1. Stuart A. Kauffman, The Origins of Order: Self-Organization and Selection in Evolution, Oxford University Press, 1993. ↩

  2. Library of Congress, “The Peripatetic U.S. Patent Office”; Elisha Gray, “Telephone caveat”, 14 February 1876. ↩

  3. Darwin Correspondence Project, “Origin” and “Alfred Russel Wallace’s essay on varieties”. ↩

  4. William F. Ogburn and Dorothy Thomas, “Are Inventions Inevitable? A Note on Social Evolution”, Political Science Quarterly 37, no. 1 (1922), 83–98. ↩

  5. Robert K. Merton, “Singletons and Multiples in Scientific Discovery: A Chapter in the Sociology of Science”, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 105, no. 5 (1961), 470–486; article scan. ↩