num_pages: 416
description: 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.
language: English
title: How Innovation Works: Serendipity, Energy and the Saving of Time
publisher: Harper