Innoveracy

A couple of weeks ago, a friend asked for my opinion about Meta’s historical struggle of building “new products” (he sent me this tweet). I mostly explained to him that going from 0 to 1 repeatedly is a challenging task for any incumbent, and I also reminded him that when Zuck acquired Instagram, Instagram had thirteen employees and literally zero revenue. Meta basically took the business from zero revenue to the highest revenue generating consumer internet business since Facebook itself (yes, even more than YouTube and Netflix).

Last week, I came across this piece by Horace Dediu (h/t SharpTech) who did a better job more than a decade ago in differentiating “innovation”. Dediu coined a new term “Innoveracy” which he defined as “the inability to understand creativity and the role it plays in society”. If I read it earlier, I would have probably just sent this piece to my friend. From the piece:

The definition of innovation is easy to find but it’s one thing to read the definition and another to understand its meaning. Rather than defining it again, I propose using a simple taxonomy of related activities that put it in context.

• Novelty: Something new
• Creation: Something new and valuable
• Invention: Something new, having potential value through utility
• Innovation: Something new and uniquely useful

The piece further explained:

Note that the taxonomy has a hierarchy. Creations are novel, inventions are creations and innovations are usually based on some invention. However inventions are not innovations and neither are creations or novelties. Innovations are therefore the most demanding works because they require all the conditions in the hierarchy. Innovations implicitly require defensibility through a unique “operating model”. Put another way, they remain unique because few others can copy them.


To be innovative is very difficult, but because of the difficulty, being innovative is usually well rewarded. Indeed, it might be easier to identify innovations simply by their rewards. It’s almost a certainty that any great business is predicated on an innovation and that the lack of a reward in business means that some aspect of the conditions of innovation were not met.

It’s thought provoking, and of course, the challenge of such taxonomy is you may find many examples in real world that may violate the specific details, but that doesn’t necessarily negate the core essence of the piece.

Finding Awe

I am currently visiting Sequoia (and Kings Canyon) National Park. I knew the Sequoias can be large but I was still quite awestruck at the size of these giants! We took this picture in front of “General Sherman” which is arguably “the largest living specimen on earth”. It is 275 feet tall with a massive trunk 36.5 feet in diameter and 109 feet in circumference at the base.

It’s not just it is pretty large, it is also pretty old…like 3,000 years old! As the image below shows, “Sequoias have a rare combination of traits—fast growth and long life”.

Fast growth and long life…that is indeed the perfect recipe for Sequoias (and investments)!

It wasn’t investments that I was pondering about while surrounded by these giants yesterday. It reminded me of this piece I read earlier this year: “Finding Awe Amid Everyday Splendor”. It really resonated with me; while one doesn’t need to come to Sequoia National Park to find “awe”, being surrounded by such splendid nature certainly naturally evokes a feeling of awe! I recommend reading the piece, but here are some key excerpts:

According to Keltner’s book, seeking “brief moments of awe is as good for your mind and body as anything you might do.”

…Respondents from 26 countries and a spectrum of religious, economic and cultural backgrounds were asked to submit their “awe stories,” recounting a moment that brought them their most memorable and potent encounter with awe.

In came anecdotes of childbirth, falling in love, natural reverie and spiritual rapture. Out of this trove of 2,600 personal narratives, the team at Berkeley distilled a definitive catalogue of awe’s elicitors. Keltner dubbed them “the eight wonders of life.” The most common source of awe was the moral beauty of other people, such as witnessing instances of compassion or courage. Also prevalent was “collective effervescence,” the sense of transcendent unity we might feel at a sporting event or when dancing in unison with others. Then came two predictable ones: nature and music, to which was added a third aesthetic stimulus, visual design. The last three could be lumped together by those of a romantic disposition as matters of the soul: spiritual awe, life and death, and epiphanies, like Archimedes’ Eureka moment, or the Damascene conversion of St. Paul.

One thing was already becoming clear: Awe is universal, as familiar to a devout Hindu in India as an atheist in Switzerland. The narratives also pointed to a phenomenology, one in which cultures archived awe, primarily in religion, but also in other “elaborated forms”: song, architecture, sport, ritual.

In addition to "Daily Dose" (yes, DAILY) like this, MBI Deep Dives publishes one Deep Dive on a publicly listed company every month. You can find all the 62 Deep Dives here.

Current Portfolio:

Please note that these are NOT my recommendation to buy/sell these securities, but just disclosure from my end so that you can assess potential biases that I may have because of my own personal portfolio holdings. Always consider my write-up my personal investing journal and never forget my objectives, risk tolerance, and constraints may have no resemblance to yours.

My current portfolio is disclosed below: