Macro-Invention and Micro-Invention

The macro/micro distinction is Joel Mokyr's analytical framework for understanding how major technological transitions unfold across time. A macro-invention is radical and discontinuous — a device or technique that operates on principles sufficiently different from anything that preceded it that its potential applications cannot be deduced from its initial form. The steam engine was a macro-invention. The printing press, electrification, the transistor — each a discontinuity that opened possibility spaces requiring decades of subsequent exploration. A micro-invention, by contrast, is an incremental improvement that exploits the potential opened by a macro-invention. James Watt's separate condenser was a micro-invention. So were the thousands of subsequent refinements — higher-pressure boilers, better metallurgy, new applications from pumping to locomotion — that transformed Newcomen's crude pump into the engine of the Industrial Revolution.