Recent archaeological discoveries are beginning to suggest a rather inauspicious beginning for one of humankind’s most crucial innovations: the wheel. According to most recent evidence, the wheel wasn’t invented all at once, but gradually emerged among rural peasant miners in the Carpathian Mountains around 6,000 years ago. Rollers (downed logs or other cylinders that heavy loads were rolled over, with the ones at the back being moved to the front after the cart passed them) had been used for some time, but the shift from those rollers to an attached wheel on an axle seemed stubbornly resistance to emergence, until these miners. 

The miners had to move heavy carts, but unlike the ancient Egyptians pulling blocks into place for the pyramids, they weren’t moving across established roads or up built ramps, they were bumping over rocky ground. This made the rollers difficult to use, because they didn’t lay flat and wouldn’t stay in place. The miners gradually made tweaks to the roller design to suit their needs, first, they cut grooves into the rollers and built corresponding slots on the bottom of the carts to that the logs would stay in line. This had the advantage of meaning you didn’t have to move the rollers from back to front because they stayed in place. Second, they started making the center of the roller thinner than the outside so that the cart could go over rocks. The evidence suggests that this happened pretty gradually. It wasn’t a new design as much as continued tweaks and updates to make them a bit more useful every single day. And eventually, the center of that roller was just a rod, and and the edges of the roller increased in diameter to give the cart height off the ground, and what became recognizably a wheel and axle was born. 

I could write a whole book about this story, but for all of our sakes, I’ll just offer 3 lessons that it could offer. 

One, innovation as a stroke of genius that transforms the world is essentially a myth. The invention of the wheel is the prototypical example of world-changing innovation and it wasn’t even invented that way. Our modern world changers – the internet, iPhones, GenAI, social media – all have similar stories. They emerged gradually from tweaking existing technologies for new uses or adding new features, not one of them emerged the way we mythologize them – fully formed, birthed from the forehead of Steve Jobs like a high-tech Athena.  

Two, innovation happens when it’s the path of least resistance. According to these most recent discoveries, no one invented the wheel, or a lot of people invented the wheel, or, more accurately, rocky mining paths invented the wheel. Innovation only happened when the thing that already existed wasn’t working, and not just wasn’t working, but was so dramatically not working that it was easier to spend hours around a campfire hand carving grooves into rollers than to keep doing it the old way. Innovation happens when the context is inconvenient enough to make innovating easier than not innovating. We all live in this reality every day – do you fix things in your home the moment they start malfunctioning? Or do you fix them when their malfunctioning becomes so annoying that it’s less work to call a handyman than to keep fighting with it? 

Three, because those first two things are true, this is as well: real innovation is much more likely to be found in the margins, in the people trying to do other things, than in the people trying to do innovation. Ideas of spiritual entrepreneurship emerged not first from the academy (although we are very attached to the academy’s leaders who championed them), but from poor churches and  communities who had to find their own way to serve their communities. A century before there were church food trucks and community gardens there were fish fries and charity shops and hot plate sales. The people with resources and the institutional power are often those who are the last to catch on to innovation because they are the people who take the longest to get to the place where innovation is easier than not innovating. The more privileged and entrenched you are, the higher the cost of changing anything. 

So what does that mean for us, as people who care about innovation, who are trying to do it on purpose, and who are often well-connected with privileged, entrenched institutions (denominational bodies, seminaries, historic chruches)? It means we are camels trying to fit through the eye of a needle. We are always going to be straining against momentum, against gravity, against our own privilege. It is also an invitation to look around for where innovation may already be emerging elsewhere, completely unnoticed. The wheel wasn’t invented by those in power, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t transformational for their lives. Those innovations on the margin need John-the-Baptist champions who prepare the way, who spread their message, who point to them in all circumstances. 

The invention of the wheel is a warning to us that innovation is never going to be as sexy or as quick as we would like it to be. It’s also an invitation to go out looking for a miner, sweaty and covered in soot, carving the first wheel by the light of a campfire, with no idea that he is changing the world.