Lightness

This chapter departs from Calvino’s prophecy on software to start our journey through the value of juxtaposition of antonyms to interpret the innovation dynamics and lay the foundations for a grammar of innovation. Calvino wrote ‘It is true that software cannot exercise its powers of lightness except through the weight of hardware. But it is software that gives the orders, acting on the outside world and on machines’. This short quote reveals Calvino’s traits as a writer and intellectual and therefore of his work. From Galileo’s experiments to the ink that cannot write in space, we have discovered the virtues of the absence of weight which for Calvino was above all an exercise in subtraction. If Netwon’s apple revealed gravity to us, we have had to leave the atmosphere for its opposite value, lightness. The steam of the industrial revolution seems to anticipate the paradigm of software. Calvino’s prophecy on software has anticipated the nature of the digital revolution that we live through now: the lightness of electrons enables images, symbols, and signs to travel across the globe much faster than human beings. Yet the complementarity of lightness and heaviness remains fundamental to make innovation happen: traditional, heavy infrastructures are indeed necessary for the operation of supply chains as much as light, digital platforms.