Intrinsic Growth

Intrinsic growth names the kind of development that cannot be accelerated by distributing products. It is the growth of a student's cognitive capacity over years of mentored engagement with increasingly complex material; the growth of a teacher's judgment over a career of practice and reflection; the growth of an institution's culture over decades of deliberate cultivation; the growth of a society's cultural norms over generations of shared experience. Intrinsic growth is what actually produces the foundations that technology amplifies, and Toyama's fieldwork demonstrated that without intrinsic growth, technological interventions produce nothing durable. The term is set against packaged interventions — the technology-industry default of distributing pre-designed solutions — and the two concepts form the analytical frame of the second half of Geek Heresy.