Innovation
Innovation
Innovation, by accident: The story of the ‘like’ button
BCG’s Martin Reeves traces the messy human journey behind one of tech’s most contagious features – and what it reveals about innovation, behavior, and unintended consequences. ...
BCG’s Martin Reeves traces the messy human journey behind one of tech’s most contagious features – and what it reveals about innovation, behavior, and unintended consequences.
It began not with a grand pitch or product demo, but with a forgotten sketch on a cardboard box.
Martin Reeves, chairman of the Boston Consulting Group’s Henderson Institute think-tank, wasn’t planning to write a book about a button. But during a casual coffee with Bob Goodson – the first employee of online review site Yelp – the conversation turned out to be unexpectedly revelatory. Out came a battered sketchbook, dated 2005, containing a crude drawing of a thumbs-up icon.
Goodson, with his fondness for saving everything from train tickets to tech relics, wasn’t even sure if he’d invented the like button. “Maybe,” he told Reeves. “Maybe not.”
What began as a casual 30-minute coffee stretched into a 12-hour deep dive into digital history – ending only when they were politely asked to leave the last open sushi restaurant in Mill Valley, California.
That meandering, midnight conversation would become the spark for Like: The Button That Changed the World – co-authored by Reeves and Goodson, now a Silicon Valley entrepreneur.
Speaking at a recent IMD Book Club discussion hosted by Knut Haanaes, Reeves shared insights from the book, which traces how a dozen lines of JavaScript code evolved into a global cultural signal – a tiny gesture that is now pressed at least seven billion times a day.
Reeves and Goodson offer a refreshingly human-centered view of innovation: not as a clean burst of genius, but as a messy, social process shaped by serendipity, culture, and unintended consequences – often with more impact than anyone could have predicted.
A tiny signal, a global pulse
The like button – as well as its cousins the heart, the star, and the upvote – is a social nudge hiding in plain sight. It’s embedded into everything from retail to ride-shares, from content feeds to communication apps. This wasn’t always the plan.
Originally, the like button was a way to encourage more user-generated content during the early days of Web 2.0, the era of the internet when users began creating, not just consuming, content. But it did something more. It reduced friction. No typing, no page refresh. Just a small act of acknowledgment.
And that small act – humble, even banal – solved problems that had dogged advertisers and platform designers for decades. It gave users a way to express preference. It gave algorithms a signal. And, critically, it gave platforms like Facebook a business model – one that now generates $164bn in annual revenue.
The like button was never just a thumbs up.
More than just a gesture
But the like button was never just a thumbs up.
Though it draws from an ancient gesture – primates displaying opposable thumbs, 19th-century paintings, Hollywood’s dramatized Roman gladiators – it’s also a deeply cultural object. In parts of Southern Europe and the Middle East, for example, the gesture can be offensive. In several Asian countries, the familiar thumbs up has given way to hearts.
Early versions of a dislike button did appear – briefly – but they didn’t last. “Negative gestures reduce engagement.” Reeves explained. In a system designed to hold attention, affirmation won out. “The positive one came to dominate.”
Serendipity, not strategy
If there’s a single theme running through Like, it’s that innovation is messy. Yet Reeves and Goodson didn’t set out to write a theory of disruption. They followed a story. “It felt like being in the audience, seeing the questions unfolding,” Reeves said of the book’s origin. The story, he added, “had a life of its own – we just followed the lead.”
They traced the origins of the like button across nearly 30 different companies, from Hot or Not to FriendFeed. Even Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s boss, resisted it at first, worried it would cheapen the product. But after FriendFeed rolled out its version in late 2007, Facebook followed suit, launching the iconic like button in 2009.
It didn’t just create engagement; it quietly rewired advertising. Suddenly, companies could measure what people liked – and monetize it.
Few could have predicted the unintended consequences of a simple gesture – from mental health concerns to misinformation and polarization.
Learning from the like
What can leaders take from all this? Reeves suggests two lessons.
First, our typical stories of innovation – lone geniuses, linear progress, grand vision – miss the mark. “The book says innovation is much, much messier and serendipitous than that,” Reeves said. “It was clearly going to be a book about innovation as a social process.”
Second, humility may be the most powerful innovation tool we have. “None of the pioneers of the like button and its variants foresaw the eventual impact,” Reeves said. “They had no sense the day they made their contributions was special.”
Few could have predicted the unintended consequences of a simple gesture – from mental health concerns to misinformation and polarization. After all, the like button was meant to help users say something simple: thanks.
A dozen lines of JavaScript, as it turns out, were enough to tap into thousands of years of human social learning.
More than economics
Perhaps the most provocative section of the book doesn’t concern tech or economics at all, but biology.
Reeves explains how the like button taps into neural reward systems that evolved long before digital media. Neuroscience shows that when we anticipate a reward, dopamine activity responds to whether the outcome matches our expectations – spiking if it exceeds them. That feedback loop reinforces behavior, making us more likely to seek it again.
A dozen lines of JavaScript, as it turns out, were enough to tap into thousands of years of human social learning.
The book’s message challenges CEOs to rethink how they manage innovation. Reeves pointed out that many companies rely on stage gates, metrics, unchanging goals, and rigid processes – which may be useful for predictable work, but less so for discovery. “The dedication in the book is to the tinkers and makers that history will forget,” he said. “So probably, be a bit more modest.”
Because in the end, the most profound changes rarely arrive with fanfare. Sometimes, they appear as sketches on cardboard boxes.
Authors
