COMBINATORIAL INNOVATION: THE INNOVATION MODEL OF POST-CAPITALIST, NON-RIVAL GOODS-BASED COMPANIES Innovation has always been “combinatorial” in nature, aka reliant on several things being invented and popularized at once. We wouldn’t have mass media without the telephone, radio and electricity. The term “combinatorial innovation” refers to a different kind of convergence—one where the “puzzle piece”—like nature of technologies mean that companies can open up their code to each other and almost instantly create something new. Combinatorial also refers to the abundance of technologies and systems that many companies can instantly build upon. So it’s not just innovation because Uber can team up with restaurants and create Uber Eats, it’s the existence of GPS, peer economies, big data cloud servers, etc etc etc. 68