Many aspects of innovation, learning and evolution can be discussed in the context of characteristic time-scales. Our current existence itself is a consequence of the fact that we live in a universe that happened to possess intrinsic time-scales that are "just right" so that galaxies, stars, planets, and finally life on planets could emerge. Lee Smolin argues that in a universe with a slightly different gravitational constant, proton mass etc. the expansion of the universe could have come to a halt billions of years ago. For other parameters expansion of the universe could have proceeded in a way that matter would have remained in the form of dust without ever collapsing into dense clusters that would give rise to the formation of stars and all the rest. He speculates that there is/has always been a whole population universes out there, most of them either disappeared in a cosmic fireworks or expand forever in a cold, boring mass of diluted gas.
In that context the creation of our universe can be seen as a rare "innovation" where all parameters and consequently time-scales are " just right". This parameter combination or point in the corresponding high dimensional landscape made evolution possible all the way from the formation of elementary particles to chemical elements, bio-molecules, cells, living organisms, brains, societies, planet-wide intelligent networks and most likely much more. It is an interesting fact that for each of the evolutionary milestones that I listed above the associated time-scales are progressively compressed but at the same time the relative change in complexity appears to be invariant. Since there are a number of different measures of complexity I want to be more specific and talk about complexity in the sense of "numbers of components dynamically interacting with each other". To a good approximation this invariant number seems to be ten billions (1010). Whereas this number could indicate the "critical mass" for "innovations" at the most fundamental level one could expect that as a general principle for conditions of innovations other values for critical mass sizes can be expected. The numerical values for the critical mass depends on a number of boundary conditions one of the more important ones is the inter-connectivity between the elements indicating the degree to which members of the complex system can communicate with each other.