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 itself that explains them and that will itself shape the 21st century for good and ill. Yet innovation remains a mysterious process, poorly understood by policymakers and businessmen, hard to summon into existence to order, yet inevitable and inexorable when it does happen.

Matt Ridley argues in this book that we need to change the way we think about innovation, to see it as an incremental, bottom-up, fortuitous process that happens to society 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 the 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, not a matter of lonely genius. It is gradual, serendipitous, recombinant, inexorable, contagious, experimental and unpredictable. 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, not with abstract argument, but from telling the lively stories of scores of innovations, how they started and why they succeeded or in some cases failed. He goes back millions of years and leaps forward into the near future. 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, fertiliser, 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, blockchain, the sharing economy, artificial intelligence, fake bomb detectors, phantom games consoles, fraudulent blood tests, faddish diets, hyperloop tubes, herbicides, copyright and even―a biological innovation―life itself.

About the Author
Matt Ridley’s books have sold over a million copies, been translated into 31 languages and won several awards. His books include The Red Queen, The Origins of Virtue, Genome, Nature via Nurture, Francis Crick, The Rational Optimist, The Evolution of Everything, and How Innovation Works. With BA and DPhil degrees from Oxford University, Matt Ridley worked for The Economist for nine years as science editor, Washington correspondent and American editor, before becoming a self-employed writer and businessman. He won the Hayek Prize in 2011, the Julian Simon award in 2012 and the Free Enterprise Award from the Institute of Economic Affairs in 2014.

GREG RAKOZY MATT RIDLEY
Bookmark (0)
ClosePlease loginn

 

Affiliate Disclosure: Some of the links or advertisements in the wordket website are affiliate links or advertisements, meaning, at no additional cost to you. We will earn a commission, if you click through and make a purchase. Thank you 🙂

Leave a Reply

You May Also Like
Read More

The Magic of Sleep

We have spent decades optimizing our waking hours, but what about the precious hours after we doze off…
Read More

The Book of Disquiet

Fernando Pessoa was many writers in one. He attributed his prolific writings to a wide range of alternate…
Read More

The Emotion Machine

In this mind-expanding book, scientific pioneer Marvin Minsky continues his groundbreaking research, offering a fascinating new model for…
Read More

Salt Water

In her debut poetry collection, Brianna Wiest pioneers a new cross-genre of writing. Through her freeform approach, Brianna’s…
Read More

All That You Deserve

You deserve to wholeheartedly love yourself and your life. You deserve to break free from your past and…
Read More

Eat That Frog!

Eat That Frog!: 21 Great Ways to Stop Procrastinating and Get More Done in Less Time It’s time…