Technology: Theory-driven experimentation and combinatorial salience

Recombination has long been seen as a central mechanism for explaining technological evolution and economic growth. Yet this view suggests several puzzles. First, the set of potential combinations is astronomically large, raising the question of how humans somehow arrive at useful combinations (amongst indefinite possibilities). And second, just as possible combinations are “unprestatable” in advance, the same goes for the elements or components that might serve as building blocks of combination. The central question, then, is how actors generate salience for useful combinations as well as plausible combinatorial components. We argue that theory-driven experimentation generates combinatorial salience by providing a shortcut for brute force search—making the combinatorial explosion analytically tractable. We link our argument to existing approaches to combination and technology, in particular, Koppl et al.’s Explaining Technology. We augment long-run, evolutionary explanations of combinatorial technology with a more decision-oriented approach. In all, we argue that human theorizing—the forward-looking use of science and causal reasoning—functions as a generative metatechnology that guides experimentation and enables the discovery of useful combinations.