How Innovation Works: And Why It Flourishes in Freedom
How Innovation Works: And Why It Flourishes in Freedom
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HarperCollins
Annotation: Building on his national bestseller The Rational Optimist, Matt Ridley chronicles the history of innovation, and how we ... more
Genre: [Social sciences]
 
Reviews: 2
Catalog Number: #6691430
Format: Paperback
Publisher: HarperCollins
Copyright Date: 2021
Edition Date: 2021 Release Date: 05/18/21
Pages: 406 pages
ISBN: 0-06-291660-2
ISBN 13: 978-0-06-291660-0
Dewey: 303.48
Dimensions: 24 cm
Language: English
Reviews:
Starred Review for Kirkus Reviews (Wed Jul 06 00:00:00 CDT 2022)

An enthusiastic history of human technical innovation.Innovation is not the same as invention, writes bestselling science writer Ridley. Innovation rarely proceeds from a single genius and takes much longer. It resembles Darwinian evolution, a process of "rearranging the world into forms that are unlikely to arise by chance-and that happen to be useful….And innovation is potentially infinite because even if it runs out of new things to do, it can always find ways to do the same things more quickly or for less energy." Throughout the book, the author delivers fascinating histories of technology that we take for granted. Many hands contributed to the developments of the steam engine, automobile, and computer. Ridley makes a convincing case that obsessive trial and error works better than inspiration and illustrates with insightful accounts of Edison, the Wright brothers, and Marconi. Some breakthroughs are inexplicable. People hauled luggage for a century, but the wheeled suitcase only appeared in the 1970s. Perhaps one of the greatest underrated innovations is corrugated sheet metal, a mainstay of slum housing around the world. Indoor flush toilets existed throughout history, but they smelled. Carrying a chamber pot outside worked better. The U-trap, a bend to prevent gases from backing up, started a revolution. Ridley's readership will not be surprised to learn that innovation flourishes where individuals are free to experiment with minimal interference from two large, unimaginative institutions: big business and government. He maintains that they worked together for a generation to suppress cellphones, which were feasible after World War II. In his opinion, the 20th century's sole innovative source of large-scale energy, nuclear power, is in decline, mostly due to government regulation. He contends that patent laws do more harm than good and has little respect for activist zealots, especially when they ignore scientific evidence, a category in which he includes both opponents of genetically modified food and vaccination.Opinionated, often counterintuitive, full of delicious stories, always provocative.

Kirkus Reviews (Fri Oct 04 00:00:00 CDT 2024)

An enthusiastic history of human technical innovation.Innovation is not the same as invention, writes bestselling science writer Ridley. Innovation rarely proceeds from a single genius and takes much longer. It resembles Darwinian evolution, a process of "rearranging the world into forms that are unlikely to arise by chance-and that happen to be useful….And innovation is potentially infinite because even if it runs out of new things to do, it can always find ways to do the same things more quickly or for less energy." Throughout the book, the author delivers fascinating histories of technology that we take for granted. Many hands contributed to the developments of the steam engine, automobile, and computer. Ridley makes a convincing case that obsessive trial and error works better than inspiration and illustrates with insightful accounts of Edison, the Wright brothers, and Marconi. Some breakthroughs are inexplicable. People hauled luggage for a century, but the wheeled suitcase only appeared in the 1970s. Perhaps one of the greatest underrated innovations is corrugated sheet metal, a mainstay of slum housing around the world. Indoor flush toilets existed throughout history, but they smelled. Carrying a chamber pot outside worked better. The U-trap, a bend to prevent gases from backing up, started a revolution. Ridley's readership will not be surprised to learn that innovation flourishes where individuals are free to experiment with minimal interference from two large, unimaginative institutions: big business and government. He maintains that they worked together for a generation to suppress cellphones, which were feasible after World War II. In his opinion, the 20th century's sole innovative source of large-scale energy, nuclear power, is in decline, mostly due to government regulation. He contends that patent laws do more harm than good and has little respect for activist zealots, especially when they ignore scientific evidence, a category in which he includes both opponents of genetically modified food and vaccination.Opinionated, often counterintuitive, full of delicious stories, always provocative.

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Starred Review for Kirkus Reviews (Wed Jul 06 00:00:00 CDT 2022)
Kirkus Reviews (Fri Oct 04 00:00:00 CDT 2024)
Bibliography Index/Note: Includes bibliographical references (pages 375-388) and index.
Reading Level: 6.0
Interest Level: 9+

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 chain, the sharing economy, artificial intelligence, fake bomb detectors, phantom games consoles, fraudulent blood tests, hyperloop tubes, herbicides, copyright, and even life itself.



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