How Innovation Works: And Why It Flourishes in Freedom
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ISBN: 9780062916600
Type: paperback
Building on his national bestseller The Rational Optimist, Matt Ridley explores the evolutionary process of innovation through the stories of many innovations from the ancient past to the near future,
“In this insightful and delightful book, Matt Ridley explores the wondrous causes of innovation, the force that drives our modern economy. It’s a joy to tag along with him as he mines the history of human advances to discover nuggets of useful lessons.” —Walter Isaacson
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 events that dominate the news; it is innovation that explains our times and will itself shape the twenty-first century. Yet innovation remains a mysterious process, poorly understood by policy makers and businesspeople alike.
Matt Ridley argues that we need to change the way we think about innovation, to see it 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 that develops according to a plan. Innovation is crucially different from invention because it is the process of turning inventions into things of practical and affordable use. 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—from steam engines to search engines, from gene editing to social media, from artificial intelligence to life itself—showing how they started and why they succeeded, or failed.
