9.3 Conceptualising Purifying Innovation

Marcos Antonio de Lima Filho, PhD.

The discontinuation of legacy components and technologies has been a recurring practice in Apple’s history. Yet, this practice raises some questions: Is purifying selection simply an idiosyncrasy of this specific company? Or perhaps just a transient trend in the consumer electronics industry? The evolutionary history of life and technology, however, suggests otherwise. This purifying process, which is pivotal for eliminating deleterious traits from a species, may provide key insights into how technologies evolve. Indeed, purification has been around since the dawn of life on Earth:

In the Cambrian period, 550 million years ago, the number of species grew very rapidly. This Cambrian explosion was followed by several large reductions in the number of species. In one of these periods, the Perm, 200 million years ago, up to 96 per cent of the total number of species became extinct. This evolutionary pattern is not unique to creation and extinction in biology but has some general characteristics. The patterns of creation and extinction in design evolution may show the same general characteristics (van Nierop et al., 1997).

As nature demonstrates over and over again, purifying selection is an important evolutionary force. It is responsible for the elimination of deleterious alleles (i.e. characteristics) from a population (Futuyma & Kirkpatrick, 2017). Given its universality, purifying selection may suggest a particular pattern of technological selection. Drawing upon this analogy, I propose the concept of “Purifying Innovation”:

Purifying innovation involves the process of replacing, discontinuing, or rejecting features, components, or standards that no longer contribute positively to a product or system’s function or appeal.

The process of purification in the technological domain involves various actions that aim to improve the quality and efficiency of designs. This might include replacing outdated technologies with advanced alternatives, discontinuing features that have lost their utility or relevance, and rejecting nascent technologies that have not proven beneficial. Take, for instance, how aviation transitioned from piston engines to jet engines due to the obsoleteness of the former; the discontinuation of CD/DVD drives in most computers as they have become redundant; or the rejection of supersonic civil aircraft due to the impractical energy costs associated with supersonic flight.

There are interesting links between purifying innovation and disruptive innovation. As previously discussed (Section 6.6), the replacement of piston engines with jet engines demanded significant changes to the architecture of commercial airliners. This moment of instability created an entry point for new companies, such as Boeing. Similarly, the transition from optical discs (CD/DVDs) to digital streaming enabled the explosive growth of online services. Netflix is an example: it transitioned from mailing physical copies to an all digital streaming library. Given such links with disruption, purifying innovation may be explored as a tool in the discovery of innovation opportunities.

Similar to innovations that disrupt the status quo, purifying innovations are counterbalanced by forces that maintain the status quo. In nature, stabilising selection preserves the genetic makeup of a given species. As a result, favourable characteristics are preserved throughout generations. In comparison, the main effect of purifying selection is the elimination of less-adapted variants (Loewe, 2008). When floppy discs and CD drives became obsolete and could be successfully replaced, purifying innovation acted by deleting these anti-features or “deleterious alleles”. If only stabilising innovation were driving the evolution of PCs, modern machines would still feature obsolete interfaces such as floppy discs, CD and DVD drives, and DVI ports, like the 2004 PowerBook (Figure 9.2.1). This case highlights the systemic relationships between the various innovation selection processes that drive the evolution of designs.