How Innovation Works, Matt Ridley
How Innovation Works, Matt Ridley
3 Rating(s)
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How Innovation Works
And Why It Flourishes in Freedom

Author: Matt Ridley

Narrator: Matt Ridley

Unabridged: 12 hr 35 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: HarperAudio

Published: 05/19/2020


Synopsis

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.

About Matt Ridley

Matt Ridley's books—including The Red Queen, Genome, The Rational Optimist, The Evolution of Everything, How Innovation Works, and most recently, Viral: the Search for the Origin of Covid-19 (with Alina Chan)—have sold over a million copies, been translated into 31 languages, and won several awards. He sat in the House of Lords from 2013 and 2021, and was founding chairman of the International Centre for Life in Newcastle. He created the “Mind and Matter” column in the Wall Street Journal in 2010, and was a columnist for the Times. He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and of the Academy of Medical Sciences, and a foreign honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He lives in Northumberland.


Reviews

Goodreads review by posthuman on June 11, 2020

How Innovation Works is an inspiring and thought-provoking review of the history of human innovation with a goal of illustrating three principles. First, that important innovations tend to arise from many people improving incrementally upon the work of others. In other words, that the singular inven......more

Goodreads review by Matt on December 11, 2020

A good book, though not quite as innovative (sorry) or eye-opening as The Rational Optimist. A lot of this book - the first 2/3 or so - is devoted to recounting in great detail different stories of innovation. Throughout these stories, Ridley occasionally reflects on the nature of innovation, drawin......more

Goodreads review by 8stitches 9lives on April 20, 2021

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 c......more

Goodreads review by Andrej on April 11, 2022

Fun little stories and pop takes and tales on innovation.......more

Goodreads review by Gregory on June 10, 2020

Ridley is your favorite dinner guest, full of fascinating stories that quickly veer from one point to the next and are offered in a haphazard order. Which is fun at a dinner party. The advantage of the rapid-fire storytelling is to mask the wild contradictions and unsupported claims that he tosses i......more