2021). 100 Subsequently, futurology scholarship developed into an interdisciplinary and holistic field of research focused on exploring how people will live and work in the future. Particularly, it analysed social/technological advancement as well as environmental trends often using techniques, such as applied forecasting and scenario analysis and emphasized the importance of systematically exploring alternatives to the present. Drawing on the fundamental ideas of futurology as ‘imagined futures’ (see below) 101 , Loreto (2015, 2016) 102 introduced the concept of the adjacent possible in the context of evolutionary biology as ‘a set of possibilities available to individuals, communities, institutions, organisms, productive processes at a given point in time during their evolution’. Subsequently, Kauffman (1996, 2000, 2002 2014) 103 extended the concept as a model of evolutionary biology and complex adaptive systems that explained how biological evolution can be seen as an exploration and actualization of what is adjacently possible - the future pathways of development available at any given present time. Kaufman (2002) also noted that ‘biological systems are able to morph into more complex systems by making incremental, relatively less energy consuming changes in their make-up’. Kaufman goes on to define ‘actuals’ as ‘boundary conditions’ that act as constraints on existing systems and, in turn, the adjacent possible as offering new options for the radical evolution of systems (in biological terms).
In his wide-ranging analysis of adjacent possible research, Björneborn (2023) defined the term in more sociological terms as:
‘nearby, possibilities constantly emerge in a multitude of settings for a multitude of entities. When these possibilities are explored, yet new possibilities emerge’ and as ‘the set of things – could be molecules, organisms, technological products, ideas, etc. – that are one step away from what actually exists and that could be reached by the incremental recombination of the existing elements.’ 104 He proposed that an example of the adjacent possible could be how new technologies emerge and evolve at specific points in time when specific technological, organizational, cultural, societal, preconditions are at hand to enable the next steps . Functionally, the concept of the adjacent possible sets out a topology of possibilities that is useful for understanding how new possibilities emerge, and how they are constrained, ignored, discovered, explored, actualized, developed, disseminated, reconfigured, designed, and so on, in an interplay between what is actual and what is possible for specific entities in specific settings at specific points in time. 100 Keßler, M., 2021. Ossip K. Flechtheim (1909–1998). Transatlantic Radicalism: Socialist and Anarchist Exchanges in the 19th and 20th Centuries, 16 , p.221. 101 Beckert (2013). "Imagined futures: fictional expectations in the economy." Theory and society 42, 219-240 and Beckert, J., 2016. Imagined Futures: Fictional Expectations and Capitalist Dynamics. Harvard UP. 102 Loreto, V. (2015). Unfolding the dynamics of creativity, novelties and innovation. White Paper of the Kreyon project. http://www.kreyon.net/en/kreyon/white-paperof-the-kreyon-project; Loreto, V., et al. (2016). Dynamics on expanding spaces: Modelling the emergence of novelties. In M. Degli Esposti et al. (Eds.), Creativity and universality in language (pp. 59–83). Cham: Springer. 103 Kauffman, S. A. (1996). Investigations: The nature of autonomous agents and the worlds they mutually create. SFI working paper # 96-08-072. Santa Fe Institute; Kauffman, S. A. (2000). Investigations. Oxford: Oxford University Press, Kauffman, S. A. (2014). Prolegomenon to patterns in evolution. Biosystems, 123, 3–8. See also work by Johnson: https://adjacentpossible.substack.com/p/we-need-a-standard-unit-of-measure who conceptualised the adjacent possible as ‘a kind of shadow future, hovering on the edges of the present state of things, a map of all the ways in which the present can reinvent itself’ and he underlines how the boundaries of the “adjacent possible” grow as they are explored. 104 Björneborn, L., 2023. Adjacent possible. In The Palgrave Encyclopaedia of the Possible (pp. 16-28). Cham: Springer International Publishing.
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