As Lawrence Husick reminds us (in From Stone to Silicon: A Brief Survey of Innovation):
“Innovation” is not just inventions; it is a process of making changes by introducing valuable new methods, ideas, or products. “Innovations” are the things themselves—the ideas, methods, and processes. It’s not simply that better mousetrap; it’s different ways of thinking and doing. Innovations may of course be inventions, but they may also be beliefs, organizational methods, and discoveries. An innovation is a value-creation mechanism. It is the way we humans manage to extract more value, generate more economic surplus and therefore more leisure time, and manage to get away from just hunting and gathering.
Thus, it is not surprising to see in his survey that many of his top 25 (actually 26, as he adds an Innovation #0) are organizational and conceptual -- not "technology" in the normal sense that we thing of it as an artifact or object. That is not to say that technology is not important: fire ranks as innovation #2. But most are conceptual.
Here is the list, in his rank order of importance (for background on each, read the report):
Innovation #25: relativity and quantum mechanics
Innovation #24: electromagnetism.
Innovation #23: evolution and natural selection.
Innovation #22: steam power.
Innovation #21: water power.
Innovation #20: the concept of science
Innovation #19: moveable type.
Innovation #18: fossil fuels, including plastics
Innovation #17: specialization of labor, including tribal and clan organization.
Innovation #16: paper,
Innovation #15: the wheel.
Innovation #14: formal law codes.
Innovation #13: the concept of money.
Innovation #12: gods and religions as social institutions
Innovation #11: systems of writing, including numbers
Innovation #10: food preservation
Innovation #9: metallurgy.
Innovation #8: ceramics and pottery.
Innovation #7: farming,
Innovation #6: clothing.
Innovation #5: symbolic communication.
Innovation #4: lever simple machine, including hammers and plows.
Innovation #3: inclined plane simple machine, including blades, wedges, chutes, slides, and screws.
Innovation #2: fire.
Innovation #1: spoken language—true semantic, syntactic, phonetic language.
Innovation #0: intentional pedagogy.
#0 is aptly labeled, as it is the foundation for all others. Accord to Husick
From telling your child that the fire is hot and not to touch it to the internet itself, intentional teaching is the most important innovation of all time.
What a great reminder of the breath and depth of the innovation process.
The thing I find amusing about this list is that it is almost exactly the technology tree from the Civilization series of computer games, in reverse.
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Thanks for posting!