We take the ideas we’ve inherited or that we’ve stumbled across, and we jigger them together into some new shape. We like to think of our ideas as $40,000 incubators,
Ecologists use the term keystone species to describe organisms which are disproportionately important to the welfare of the ecosystem.
The Global Positioning System (GPS) is a good example of such a platform. Originally developed for military use, it has now spurned countless innovations from GPS trackers to location-based services and advertising.
Platforms often stack on top of each other, meaning that one platform provides the foundation for even more platforms, which again produce countless new innovations.
