When new TVs or mobile phones sit on store shelves, they seem self-contained. The experience is designed to inspire awe: innovations are placed on shrine-like displays with no signs of their manufacturing; all finished, polished, and gift-wrapped in plastic; waiting to be taken home. But if you look under the cover of any innovation, the magic of self-containment fades. There are subinventions, subproducts, minor-breakthroughs, and parts and components, each with a story of their own. Every wondrous thing is comprised of many other wondrous things.

In The Engines of Our Ingenuity, John Lienhard writes:

Mobile phones and DVD players have dozens of screws—not to mention transistors, chips, batteries, and software. Take any of those pieces, divide again, and there's even more innovation hiding inside. It's easy to forget that the innovations we use are comprised of a series of smaller innovations. However, making new things requires taking apart other things and learning from the pieces. Sometimes inventors even work the other way, developing breakthroughs by deliberately experimenting with existing innovations.

The first killer app, the software that legitimized personal computers, was the spreadsheet.^[101] Before VisiCalc was released for the Apple II in 1978, most of the world did budgets, accounting, and business planning on paper. ^[102] VisiCalc was the reason computers shifted from geek toys to mainstream business problem-solving tools. Dan Bricklin, one of the creators of VisiCalc, developed the idea while pursuing an MBA at Harvard. In his mind, the birth of VisiCalc came from a combination of existing ideas (count the previous innovations he mentions in this short passage):

His early vision for VisiCalc involved calculators, mice, fighter planes, the paper spreadsheets he'd seen in his MBA classes, his frustrations with boring accounting assignments, and his awareness of what a computer programming language might be able to build. Naturally, as VisiCalc developed, the dependence on these ideas faded. Bricklin explains, "Eventually, my vision became more realistic, and the heads-up display gave way to a normal screen. The mouse was replaced in the first prototype in the early fall of 1978 by the game paddle of the Apple II." However, those ideas remained building blocks and inspirations. Remove one and VisiCalc may not have been made.

This theme of connections isn't limited to technology: you can find similar webs of innovation in all fields, from business to the arts to science. James Burke's famous book Connections^[104] relentlessly explores the intertwined nature of inventions. Even the most famous five characters in the world, E=mc², credited to Einstein, were based on concepts that came from many people. In David Bodanis' book, E=mc², ^[105] he explains how the work of Faraday, Lavoisier, Newton, and Galileo were the essential building blocks that made Einstein's formula possible. Each contribution—E for energy, m for mass, and c for the speed of light—was a concept developed by others; Einstein's breakthrough was his approach in bringing them all together.

Despite the myths, innovations rarely involve someone working alone, and never in history has an invention been made without reusing ideas from the past. For all of our chronocentric glee, our newest ideas have historic roots: the term network is 500 years old, webs were around before the human race, and the algorithmic DNA is more elegant and powerful than any programming language. Wise innovators—driven by passion more than ego—initiate partnerships, collaborations, and humble studies of the past, raising their odds against the timeless challenges of innovation.