How Innovation Works

And Why It Flourishes in Freedom

By: Matt Ridley

Narrated by: Matt Ridley

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 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 policy makers 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 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 modelled 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, block chain, 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.

Enjoyably Informative

I’m surprised to see others distressed by the key theme that innovation thrives in freedom. The evidence appears overwhelming. It is acknowledged that some areas, such as drugs, need some measures to assure quacks don’t proliferate. The stories of innovation provide a fresh set of details in an entertaining fashion on subjects that many, including me, have heard though only the “bumper-sticker” version of. Ridley’s views on what helps and what hurts innovation may be debatable, but his points are presented in a such a lively and humorous fashion, that even the most casual or skeptical reader/listener should enjoy this book.

Bussin

Best piece of literary work I have read in a decade. Brilliant writer and story teller.

Why innovation stops working.

The best chapter to me is about how innovation came to slow down. How a previous breakthrough might stop the next leap in technology to flourish.

Read it twice in one week.
And will read it again soon.

Very informative

A great summary of libertarian thinking about how the world has evolved;.The conservative views will offend some people, but the fact remains that freedom is a driving force of innovation and human progress.
The arguments are at times difficult to follow, and repetition is a little omnipresent. Otherwise a great read .
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A feast for thought

Very thought provoking. The real innovation is a cultural process to balance reasonable safety with openness to interactive innovation in quick to market products. There is real risk of catastrophic outcomes that cannot be ignored.