  The notion of the "adjacent possible" has been advanced to theorize the
generation of novelty across many different research domains. This study is an
attempt to examine in what way the notion can be made empirically useful for
innovation studies. A theoretical framework is construed based on the notion of
innovation a search process of recombining knowledge to discover the "adjacent
possible". The framework makes testable predictions about the rate of
innovation, the distribution of innovations across organizations, and the rate
of diversification or product portfolios. The empirical section examines how
well this framework predicts long-run patterns of new product introductions in
Sweden, 1908-2016 and examines the long-run evolution of the product space of
Swedish organizations. The results suggest that, remarkably, the rate of
innovation depends linearly on cumulative innovations, which explains
advantages of incumbent firms, but excludes the emergence of "winner takes all"
distributions. The results also suggest that the rate of development of new
types of products follows "Heaps' law", where the share of new product types
within organizations declines over time. The topology of the Swedish product
space carries information about future product diversifications, suggesting
that the adjacent possible is not altogether `"unprestatable".
