How Innovation Works

Name: How Innovation Works
ISBN: 9780062916600

And Why It Flourishes in Freedom

by Matt Ridley

4/5

(94 votes)

Building on his national bestseller The Rational Optimist, Matt Ridley chronicles the history of innovation, and how we need to change our thinking on the subject.

Innovation is the main event of the modern age, the reason we experience both dramatic improvements in our living standards and unsettling changes in our society.

Forget short-term symptoms like Donald Trump and Brexit, it is innovation that will shape the twenty-first century.

Yet innovation remains a mysterious process, poorly understood by policy makers and businessmen alike.

Matt Ridley argues that we need to see innovation as an incremental, bottom-up, fortuitous process that happens as a direct result of the human habit of exchange, rather than an orderly, top-down process developing according to a plan.

Innovation is crucially different from invention, because it is the turning of inventions into things of practical and affordable use to people.

It speeds up in some sectors and slows down in others.

It is always a collective, collaborative phenomenon, involving trial and error, not a matter of lonely genius.

It happens mainly in just a few parts of the world at any one time.

It still cannot be modeled properly by economists, but it can easily be discouraged by politicians.

Far from there being too much innovation, we may be on the brink of an innovation famine.

Ridley derives these and other lessons from the lively stories of scores of innovations, how they started and why they succeeded or failed.

Some of the innovation stories he tells are about steam engines, jet engines, search engines, airships, coffee, potatoes, vaping, vaccines, cuisine, antibiotics, mosquito nets, turbines, propellers, fertilizer, zero, computers, dogs, farming, fire, genetic engineering, gene editing, container shipping, railways, cars, safety rules, wheeled suitcases, mobile phones, corrugated iron, powered flight, chlorinated water, toilets, vacuum cleaners, shale gas, the telegraph, radio, social media, block cha.

First published: May 18, 2021
Publishers: Harper Perennial

About Matt Ridley

Matthew White Ridley, 5th Viscount Ridley DL FRSL FMedSci (born 7 February 1958, in Northumberland) is an English science writer, businessman and aristocrat. Ridley was educated at Eton and Magdalen College, Oxford where he received a doctorate in zoology before commencing a career in journalism. Ridley worked as the science editor of The Economist from 1984 to 1987 and was then its Washington correspondent from 1987 to 1989 and American editor from 1990 to 1992....

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And Why It Flourishes in Freedom

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