Term of the Moment
laser sintering
Definition: recombinant innovation
Recombinant innovation is a phrase from the book The Second Machine Age that highlights the way new applications are invented from a combination of existing technologies. For example, the Waze navigation app became a very innovative product by combining components and systems that already existed. Waze uses the smartphone, GPS, digital maps, cellular system, social networking concept and the Internet to provide a real-time navigation application that is used by millions of people. See Waze.
A Dissertation on the Modern World
Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee's book is an extremely interesting and insightful look into how technologies evolved and where they might be headed.