All it takes is one shove to start a wave of jostling in a packed crowd. But (with apologies to Adam Smith), there’s rarely just one invisible hand that creates waves of innovation.

The amazingly rapid development of the Web, which moved like a tsunami across thousands of businesses and out into the world at large, took many hands—hands that were often unwittingly working in concert.

Now we are at risk of being stuck dead in the water. Rather than working together in ways that benefit everyone, companies are delaying innovation because of a narrow, and misguided, sense of self-interest.

The solution is, first, to understand what I call the wave theory of how major innovations occur. Then we need to form partnerships that will let us ride those waves together, in ways that help all of us.

In the parlance of economists, the reason for concern relates to “acute costs” and “diffuse benefits.” In layman’s terms, that means some individual company or small group is expected to bear all the costs of an innovation even though many share in the value.

The history of the lowly cash register serves to illustrate.

Twenty years ago, businessmen understood that the entire economic system would work better if fewer people used checks in supermarkets. With checks, each night someone had to manually read each one and type in the amount—an inefficient process that added to costs for all concerned. If supermarkets switched to cash registers that could handle debit- and credit-card readers, the inefficiencies would go away.

The problem was that every store would have had to buy new electronic cash registers, while getting a negligible increase in productivity for cashiers. Although society would benefit, society wasn’t going to buy those registers. Ergo, stores wouldn’t switch.

Yet stores switched anyway. Today, almost all supermarkets process transactions electronically. We use far fewer checks.

How did we get there from here? Because of waves. The hurdle for the shopkeeper was reduced by four unrelated events, by four independent actors, for diverse reasons. The result was a wave of momentum that reduced the acute cost to the shopkeeper and made the benefits greater. Here is what happened:

Bar codes came of age. They no longer merely simplified the logistics of pricing but also could be used in inventory control. Store owners received benefits that could help offset the costs of the registers.

AT&T (www.att.com) was broken up. That change gradually reduced to almost zero the cost for a store to call a central computer and verify a card’s validity.

Credit-card companies broadened the number of users of their cards by expanding their market from specialty stores to general use, and from low-risk customers to the population at large.

Banks supported the shift in technology by charging more for processing checks and less for handling cards.

The change still wasn’t easy. When scanning registers were introduced in Massachusetts, in the late 1970s, ordinances required individual price stamps on food. This eliminated most of the efficiencies from scanning and delayed the widespread adoption of new registers for 10 years. Yet the change did happen, to the benefit of anyone who ever feels impatient in a checkout line.

The same sort of wave action solved the initial cost/benefit problem for the Web.

A few years ago I asked Internet pioneer Vint Cerf at MCI (when there was an MCI) why he was laying fiber-optic cable so fast. He said he saw the Internet taking off and intended to lead its diffusion, even though he couldn’t identify the return on investment at the time. Indeed, everyone invested at once. MCI installed the communications backbone, the Internet-service-provider industry formed to give households access, Walt Disney Co. (www.disney.com) and scores of others invested in putting their content online, the venture-capital community supplied the risk capital for innovative new uses, and so on.

MCI executives didn’t worry that they were laying the groundwork for Disney to make more money on content; the executives were happy to capitalize on the demand for telecommunications capacity created by Disney, the ISPs, and the VCs. The effect was a rising tide that lifted all boats. Everyone was capitalizing on each other’s investments.

Very quickly, more than 50% of the country was online. No consumer would buy a $1,000 computer just to save $3 on a Lands’ End Inc. (www.landsend.com) blouse, but she might if most of her shopping could be done from home, if she could e-mail all her friends, if she could pay her taxes online, and.... There is little doubt that society is better off.

Today, the tide is falling. When that happens, we bail, preferably into the next fellow’s boat. We now judge innovations in isolation rather than in context. We attempt only the ideas where the acute risk is low and the benefit is local.

The local telephone companies, for instance, absolutely refuse to build out a better connection to the home in the current regulatory environment. They see the idea as a risk on their part for a gain by their competitors.

We would all win if the ExxonMobil Corp. Speedpass (www.speedpass.com), or an equivalent, would also work at McDonald’s, CVS stores, parking meters, and tollgates. Not only would payments become easier, but companies could start to identify individual customers, which would push a wave of expansion in related services. But we haven’t gotten past the gas pump. The bottom-line issue is: Who will pay for all these readers?

I can’t argue how any individual company assesses innovation, but I can provide one bit of homespun advice: Don’t do it alone.

In this connected world, there is no investment that will fail to help someone else at least as much as it helps you. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t invest. Instead, it means you should look around for partners who are already halfway to where you want to go.

If you’re General Motors Corp. (www.gm.com) and you want cars to be connected to the Internet, work with banks to turn cars into mobile automated teller machines. Work with drive-through restaurants to let people order from their cars while en route.

If you want to install wireless Internet connections in airports, work with Starbucks Corp. (www.starbucks.com) and airline clubs, which have similar goals. (Mobilstar failed because it tried going it alone.)

The only way to return to a climate of innovation and opportunity is to create another wave. And the only way to do that is by looking outside an individual business to potential partners. Perhaps all we need is a little shove in the right direction.

Lippman directs the Digital Life Consortium at the MIT Media Lab and is graduate officer for the Media Arts and Sciences Program. He can be reached at lip@media.mit.edu.