Specialized Innovation Is Easier

Think about a couple of things we know about job expertise and innovation: Larger cities and larger companies both have both more specialization and more (i.e., quicker) innovation. More international industries also have both more specialization and innovation. And across the excellent eras of human history (animal, forager, farmer, industry), each period has actually brought more specialization, and likewise much faster rates of innovation.

Here’s a basic explanation for (part of) this commonly observed correlation: It is easier to produce tools and treatments to enhance jobs the more information you learn about them, and the less that job context differs across the job classification. (It is also much easier to totally automate such tasks; human level generality is very hard.)

It appears harder to find a way to make a 1% improvement in a generic truck, developed to take any type or size of things any distance over any type of road, in any type of weather, relative to a very specific type of truck, such as for carrying animals, oil, automobiles, ice cream, etc. It gets even easier if you specialize to particular distances, roads, weather condition, and so on. Partly this is because the majority of ways to enhance the generic truck will likewise use to specialized trucks, but the reverse isn’t real.

This may sound obvious, however note that this is not our usual explanation for these correlations in each context. We generally state that cities are more ingenious because they enable more opportunity interactions that generate ideas, not because they are more specialized. We say larger firms are more innovative since they have larger market shares, and so internalize more of the gains from development. We state more international markets are more capital intensive, and capital innovates much faster. And we state that it is simply a coincidence that in time we have actually both specialized more and developed much better methods to innovate.

My simpler more unified description suggests that, more typically than we have actually previously understood, expertise is the essential to development. So we must look more to discovering better ways to specialize to promote future development. Such as less product range and more remote work.