Smart Phone and Individual - What Makes Them Valuable or Worthless (and what that tells us about the imperative to take entrepreneurship, or social invention, seriously)

Consider a smart phone a metaphor for the potential of the individual.

In the 1940s, a smart phone would have been both fascinating and largely worthless. With no internet, no phone network, no software to run on, it would have been ineffective. The value of the smart phone does not come from the phone or from electricity or from apps or from the internet or cells to enable phone calls. It comes out of the interaction of all of those, the interdependencies that emerge in the performance of "the phone."

Over time, we've created systems that have increased the potential of individuals. A person in 2024 is wildly more productive than a person in 1924. This isn't because the individual - the smart phone - is engineered any better. It is because of myriad systems it is now a part of.

In a sense, we both over and underestimate the importance of the individual. Overestimate because within the wrong system, there is little the individual can do. Underestimate because we still don't fully understand what potential looks like because we still haven't created the social reality that allows the individual to fully realize that potential. (And never really will. Evolution. History. They are hardly near their end.)

If entrepreneurship is to institutions what invention is to products, it is entrepreneurship that changes our potential over time. We create institutions that then create us. As those systems evolve, so does our potential.