Tech people love stories about breakthrough innovations—gadgets or technologies that emerge suddenly and take over, like the iPhone or Twitter. Indeed, there's a whole industry of pundits, investors, and websites trying feverishly to predict the Next New Big Thing. The assumption is that breakthroughs are inherently surprising, so it takes special genius to spot one coming.

But that's not how innovation really works, if you ask Bill Buxton. A pioneer in computer graphics who is now a principal researcher at Microsoft, he thinks paradigm-busting inventions are easy to see coming because they're already lying there, close at hand. "Anything that's going to have an impact over the next decade—that's going to be a billion-dollar industry—has always already been around for 10 years," he says.

Buxton calls this the "long nose" theory of innovation: Big ideas poke their noses into the world very slowly, easing gradually into view.

Can this actually be true? Buxton points to exhibit A, the pinch-and-zoom gesture that Apple introduced on the iPhone. It seemed like a bolt out of the blue, but as Buxton notes, computer designer Myron Krueger pioneered the pinch gesture on his experimental Video Place system in 1983. Other engineers began experimenting with it, and companies like Wacom introduced tablets that let designers use a pen and a puck simultaneously to manipulate images onscreen. By the time the iPhone rolled around, "pinch" was a robust, well-understood concept.

A more recent example is the Microsoft Kinect. Sure, the idea of controlling software just by waving your body seems wild and new. But as Buxton says, engineers have long been perfecting motion-sensing for alarm systems and for automatic doors in grocery stores. We've been controlling software with our bodies for years, just in a different domain.

This is why truly billion-dollar breakthrough ideas have what Buxton calls surprising obviousness. They feel at once fresh and familiar. It's this combination that lets a new gizmo take off quickly and dominate.

The iPhone was designed by Apple engineers who had learned plenty from successes and failures in the PDA market, including, of course, their own ill-fated Newton. By the time they added those pinch gestures, they'd made the obvious freshly surprising.

If you want to spot the next thing, Buxton argues, you just need to go "prospecting and mining"—looking for concepts that are already successful in one field so you can bring them to another. Buxton particularly recommends prospecting the musical world, because musicians invent gadgets and interfaces that are robust and sturdy yet creatively cool—like guitar pedals. When a team led by Buxton developed the interface for Maya, a 3-D design tool, he heavily plundered music hardware and software. ("There's normal spec, there's military spec, and there's rock spec," he jokes.)

OK: If it's so easy to spy the future, what are Buxton's predictions? He thinks tablet computers, pen-based interfaces, and omnipresent e-ink are going to dominate the next decade. Those inventions have been slowly stress-tested for 20 years now, and they're finally ready.

Using a "long nose" analysis, I have a prediction of my own. I bet electric vehicles are going to become huge—specifically, electric bicycles. Battery technology has been improving for decades, and the planet is urbanizing rapidly. The nose is already poking out: Electric bikes are incredibly popular in China and becoming common in the US among takeout/delivery people, who haul them inside their shops each night to plug them in. (Pennies per charge, and no complicated rewiring of the grid necessary.) I predict a design firm will introduce the iPhone of electric bikes and whoa: It'll seem revolutionary!

But it won't be. Evolution trumps revolution, and things happen slowly. The nose knows.

Email clive@clivethompson.net.