What the Like Button Can Teach Us About Innovation

In 2022 one of the author (Bob) was going through the onerous process of moving from one house to another when he stumbled upon an old sketch in his files. It depicted a prototype for a thumbs-up like button, made when Bob was the first employee at the review site Yelp. Today the like button can be found everywhere on the internet. It has transformed digital advertising and marketing and helped fuel the growth of the $250 billion social media industry. Most people assume it was invented by Facebook, the firm that first used it at scale. But intriguingly, the date on the sketch (May 18, 2005) preceded the adoption of the like button at Facebook by nearly four years.

People tend to think that innovations spring from farsighted individuals who change history by creating new solutions to well-defined challenges. Yet here was Bob, standing amid his household detritus with a bemused look on his face and only a distant memory of his contribution to one of the most important mechanisms of the digital realm. Could it be that Bob had, in fact, invented the like button—and that he had simply forgotten about it?

The discovery of the sketch inspired us to have a day-long conversation, then start a three-year research journey, and eventually write a book, Like: The Button That Changed the World. Alas for Bob, our research was unable to identify a single clear inventor of the thumbs-up button, but that’s part of what makes its origin story so instructive. Indeed, the button’s design, development, and deployment could be considered a miniature case study on the true nature of innovation—which is distributed, unpredictable, and often far more modest in ambition than heroic innovation narratives suggest.

Many organizations like to believe that innovation can be channeled along a pathway from concept to implementation that’s been tightly defined by smart managers. That’s a reassuring perspective because it feels empowering and calls for companies to do what they do best—allocate their resources and design and control processes. But the origins of the like button reveal that innovation tends to be serendipitous and social in nature—a melding of accidents, ideas, iterations, false starts, missed opportunities, and unexpected outcomes that cannot be willed or cajoled into existence. While not entirely new, this understanding is hard for companies to internalize. But in an era when artificial intelligence and other technological advances will upend business models, the wild story of the like button holds key lessons for managers who seek a better way to encourage and harness innovation.

The murky origin of the like button illustrates how innovation often emerges from unplanned cooperation across a distributed network of contributors. Each player implemented its own variant of the button, sometimes incorporating elements invented by the others. This story also highlights the power of clustering. In Silicon Valley the proximity of many tech startups and the culture of openness created a fertile environment for the exchange of ideas. Pioneers in the industry were keenly aware of and inspired by their competitors, sharing know-how at frequent meetups and informal discussions. And the story also suggests that sometimes innovations are simply “in the air” and ready to be discovered.

But perhaps most important, the like button’s story demonstrates the disorderly, evolutionary, and iterative nature of innovation. The various companies experimenting with it created a myriad of designs and functionalities. Far from being the result of a single “Eureka!” by an individual, it emerged from a series of small improvements made by different teams working separately yet influenced by one another’s progress.

There are several good reasons to revise the innovation practices at large companies to reflect the reality  described above.  Five ways that companies can improve their innovation models and practices.  A) Be Alert for Surprises( Measure it, Model it, Nurture it, and Reflect on it).  B) Take Things Step-by-Step (Avoid making a master plan, Conduct trail sooner, Be receptive to unintended outcomes, and persist).  C) Lay the Myth of the Solo Inventor to Rest (Recognize multiple heroes, Promote cognitive diversity, and Practice humility).  D) Calibrate Managerialism (Foster curiosity, Avoid the tyranny of averages, and Legitimize inconsistency).  And E) Shift Your Mental Model (Learn from the past, Embrace storytelling, and Model and train people in the new approaches).

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