Innovation proceeds by recombining what already exists, so the reachable set expands one step at a time.
European mass printing depended on a local combination of paper supply, metal type, suitable inks, presses and markets. Gutenberg combined these in mid-fifteenth-century Europe; movable metal type had already been developed in Korea centuries earlier.
In practice
- A team cannot build the analytics dashboard until the event logging exists, and cannot justify the logging without the dashboard; the reachable next step is a single tracked event.
- A town cannot support a bakery until there is foot traffic, and gets foot traffic when the bakery opens.