What makes digital technology unique in how it drives innovation in business?
I write this post in response to my lecturer’s belief that a distinctive feature of digital technology is modularity. Standardized interfaces, protocols and APIs can compose together to produce Combinatorial Innovation.
The lecturer’s chief example of this is quite a good one. She talks about the protocol stack in networking, and how different layers compose on top of each other: You might browse the web with HTTP/TCP/IP/Ethernet, or play games with UDP/IP/Wi-Fi, or phone call with SIP/RTP/UDP/IP/4G LTE. The overall application leverages other layers in the network stack to produce something new and valuable to the end user.
To a large extent, I see how my lecturer rings true. Think about the average web app: the app uses a javascript framework, the framework uses browser APIs, the browser APIs are wrappers around C++ code which themselves use syscalls. The syscalls are an interface to the kernel, the kernel’s device drivers manage underlying hardware, the hardware itself composed of many integrated circuits. It’s modularity all the way down. A web developer is completely shielded from whatever operating system the end user uses — the code works just the same on a smart fridge, as it does on an iphone.
I’d go one step further than the lecturer. Digital technologies are not unique because they are modular — everything humans do has modularity.
An API is really just a digital interface, and there’s all sorts interfaces in the physical world. The buttons on a microwave. The pedals in a car. The controls on a remote. Each of these interfaces do the same as any API — it conceals implementation details and gives higher level tools to the user.
Good mechanical equipment is ‘modular’ in that it is made from standardized parts — an ISO screw will have a thread that matches any ISO nut of the same diameter; a load-bearing plate can be fixed to any material as long as a compatible screw is used. In the same way that you might browse the web with HTTP/TCP/IP, aren’t you also driving with modular components like “Unleaded Petrol/TIG Welded Chassis/ISO Fixings”?
If everything is modular, why is there so much innovation in digital tech?
I’m slightly struggling with this part.
I think that many technologies are modular, but digital technologies allow far more things to be composed together than other types of technology.
I think this is a couple factors that (at least partially) explain this:
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Turing Completeness: Given a few loose conditions, any programming language can solve any computationally tractable problem. This leads to enhanced modularity in digital contexts, because every execution environment is equally capable. Every interface is Turing complete: The operating system running on bare metal, the web browser running on the operating system, the javascript interpreter running in the browser.
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Moore’s law & insanely fast hardware: Every interface carries a penalty in efficiency: the operating system is written to be device agnostic, the browser is written to be operating system agnostic, the browser’s javascript interpreter is slower than raw machine code. This ‘modularity’ is would have been unacceptable on hardware from two decades ago, but the lost efficiency is negligble on today’s hardware.
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