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72 DESIGN007 MAGAZINE I JUNE 2023 In the inspirational and informative book titled, Where Good Ideas Come From, author Steven Johnson uses the term "the adjacent possible." is term, which immediately cap- tivated my mind, originated with a theoretical biologist named Stuart Kaufman, who used the term in his book, Investigations, to describe the circuitous path of biological evolution. For Johnson, however, the "adjacent possible," which is one of the places "good ideas come from," conceptually includes everything that's one step away from what currently exists, with more is yet to come. is is important. ere is a necessary precondition that there must be an immediate nexus to make something "adja- cently possible." is notion made immediate sense to me as an unrepentant futurist and inventor. I suspect The Adjacent Possible it is a term that might or should resonate with other inventors as well. One might be able to sense something special waiting to be discov- ered in the future, but one must first secure their intellectual foothold in the present time and place to successfully take the next step. One must conquer what is near before they can approach and conquer what's in the dis- tance. Interestingly, once one secures what is adjacent, new adjacencies appear that might cause a beneficial change in thought or direc- tion. In this way, invention is a constant and never-ending process in much the same way that Kaufman envisioned the path of biologi- cal evolution in his thesis. To that end, and with regard to the evolution of the electronics industry, I had an epiphany a few months ago: I realized I had purchased my Flexible Thinking by Joe Fjelstad, VERDANT ELECTRONICS