The cliff of innovation: why integration, not construction, is the hard part of building a system that acts inside a company

This working paper names and describes a point that the author reached while building Hellomatik, a Madrid company whose product acts inside other companies: the cliff of innovation. It is the point where what you want to make is either not invented yet, or has to be assembled from so many different parts that the difficulty stops being building it and becomes integrating it well enough that the result behaves like one system rather than a collection of parts. The paper sets out why most of the parts of such a system already exist, what does not exist for any given company (a written account of what is true, which rules the business already follows, which actions can be undone and who may approve what), how a badly integrated system can be recognised from the chair of the person using it, and why the integration is where the effort goes. It then states the limit the author found at the edge: the possibilities of a system that acts inside a company end where the creativity of the last person who uses it ends. Three checkable predictions follow, along with the paper's limits. Self-published, not peer reviewed. A shorter version appeared on the author's site, isaac-correa.github.io/cliff.