I wrote earlier this week about the difficulty of figuring out whether a new technology is going to be a Big New Thing or remain a pipe dream of die-hard true believers.

It reminded me of a great conversation I had in 2011 with Bill Buxton, a computer scientist and expert in the field of human–computer interaction.

He told me about his theory of innovation: The “Long Nose”.

Most huge innovations emerge gradually, not suddenly

As Buxton’s argument goes, very few major technologies emerge suddenly. Quite the opposite: They’re usually the product of gradual tinkering and experimentation, with engineers and designers puttering around for years or even decades. Things get slowly refined, and the new tech starts being used in real-world circumstances, but mostly in niche areas.

Eventually some mass-market inventor notices these niche uses and realizes huh, this tech really works now. They build it into a mainstream product — which bursts into truly mass adoption.

Or as Buxton put it to me when I wrote about this for Wired in 2011…

“Anything that’s going to have an impact over the next decade — that’s going to be a billion-dollar industry — has always already been around for 10 years,” he says.

What the long nose looks like

Buxton calls this the “long nose,” based on a chart he drew, below. The X-axis is time; the Y-axis is adoption. During the long period when the technology is being refined, it’s not very widespread. Then suddenly it bursts into mass adoption.

You can think of innovation, Buxton argues, as a long nose that very slowly creeps into view.

He described a few technologies that, back in 2011, were regarded — by most press and everyday consumers — as hot new concepts that had been introduced suddenly. One was pinch-to-zoom on the iPhone. Another was the body-tracking tech of the Microsoft Kinect.

But neither was new at all. Both, Buxton pointed out, had been in development for a very long time. Indeed, body-tracking tech had been in widespread use for years, albeit in a more lo-fi way…

Buxton points to exhibit A, the pinch-and-zoom gesture that Apple introduced on the iPhone. It seemed like a bolt out of the blue, but as Buxton notes, computer designer Myron Krueger pioneered the pinch gesture on his experimental Video Place system in 1983. Other engineers began experimenting with it, and companies like Wacom introduced tablets that let designers use a pen and a puck simultaneously to manipulate images onscreen. By the time the iPhone rolled around, “pinch” was a robust, well-understood concept.

A more recent example is the Microsoft Kinect. Sure, the idea of controlling software just by waving your body seems wild and new. But as Buxton says, engineers have long been perfecting motion-sensing for alarm systems and for automatic doors in grocery stores. We’ve been controlling software with our bodies for years, just in a different domain.

The upshot is that really huge ideas have a sort of weird familiarity — a “surprising obviousness.” They make sense precisely because on some level they’re not that new.

This is why truly billion-dollar breakthrough ideas have what Buxton calls surprising obviousness. They feel at once fresh and familiar. It’s this combination that lets a new gizmo take off quickly and dominate.

To spy the next big thing, go “prospecting”

If you wanted to predict the Next Big Thing, the Long Nose theory suggests that you don’t need to look in top-secret corporate innovation labs or in the latest scientific literature.

No, you look in the world around you. As Buxton told me, you go “prospecting and mining” — and see what tools are already being eagerly used in areas that lie just outside the mainstream. Those are the technologies that are being stress-tested to the point where they’re ripe to become a mass phenomenon. And you look for something that has that element of “surprising obviousness.”

Back in 2011, I used this “prospecting” technique to predict that electric bikes would become a big deal. Back then, almost no average citizens owned or rode electric bikes. But living in New York, I’d noticed that an increasing number of delivery guys were using them. Electric bikes elegantly solved a bunch of problems for delivery workers: The bikes were rugged, cheap to operate, had swappable batteries, were quick to park, and they greatly expanded the range in which you could operate.

The ebike, to me, perfectly fit the Long Nose theory. It was a technology already in wide use in a niche area. It was the product of years of gradual tweaking, and was still being tweaked. And it had surprising obviousness: I didn’t need to learn any big industrial secret, or explain a bafflingly complex technology to the average person. Once I pointed that a) ebikes are incredibly useful to delivery folks and thus b) they were poised to hit the mainstream, most people would go, oh, yeah, that makes sense.

As I wrote in Wired…

Battery technology has been improving for decades, and the planet is urbanizing rapidly. The nose is already poking out: Electric bikes are incredibly popular in China and becoming common in the US among takeout/delivery people, who haul them inside their shops each night to plug them in. (Pennies per charge, and no complicated rewiring of the grid necessary.) I predict a design firm will introduce the iPhone of electric bikes and whoa: It’ll seem revolutionary!

Ten years later, I can see that I was wrong about the “iPhone” of electric bikes. No company has dominated the market with a single product.

But I was bang-on that ebikes were heading towards mainstream viability. That’s now happening: In recent years, ebike sales have exploded. In 2020, Americans bought about 500,000 ebikes, up 145% from the previous year. There are now dozens of companies offering oodles of styles — from multi-passenger family wagons to sleek folding ebikes you can carry up the stairs for apartment living. And the takeover of delivery by ebikes is, in tightly packed cities like NYC, complete. There’s essentially no food delivery that doesn’t happen on ebikes.

So: What other technologies are currently in the Long Nose? Which ones have been slowly peeking into view? Which have “surprising obviousness”?

Clive Thompson is a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine, a columnist for Wired and Smithsonian magazines, and a regular contributor to Mother Jones. He’s the author of Coders: The Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World, and Smarter Than You Think: How Technology is Changing our Minds for the Better. He’s @pomeranian99 on Twitter and Instagram.