How Innovation Works: Serendipity, Energy and the Saving of Time

Length: 416 pages
Edition: 1
Language: English
Publisher: Fourth Estate
Publication Date: 2021-03-04
ISBN-10: 0008334846
ISBN-13: 9780008334840
Sales Rank: #931794 (See Top 100 Books)

‘Ridley is spot-on when it comes to the vital ingredients for success’ Sir James Dyson

Building on his 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. 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 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 from the lively stories of scores of innovations – from steam engines to search engines – how they started and why they succeeded or failed.

Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Contents
Introduction: The Infinite Improbability Drive
1. Energy
    Of heat, work and light
    What Watt wrought
    Thomas Edison and the invention business
    The ubiquitous turbine
    Nuclear power and the phenomenon of disinnovation
    Shale gas surprise
    The reign of fire
2. Public health 
    Lady Mary’s dangerous obsession
    Pasteur’s chickens
    The chlorine gamble that paid off
    How Pearl and Grace never put a foot wrong
    Fleming’s luck
    The pursuit of polio
    Mud huts and malaria
    Tobacco and harm reduction
3. Transport 
    The locomotive and its line
    Turning the screw
    Internal combustion’s comeback
    The tragedy and triumph of diesel
    The Wright stuff
    International rivalry and the jet engine
    Innovation in safety and cost
4. Food 
    The tasty tuber
    How fertilizer fed the world
    Dwarfing genes from Japan
    Insect nemesis
    Gene editing gets crisper
    Land sparing versus land sharing
5. Low-technology innovation 
    When numbers were new
    The water trap
    Crinkly tin conquers the Empire
    The container that changed trade
    Was wheeled baggage late?
    Novelty at the table
    The rise of the sharing economy
6. Communication and computing 
    The first death of distance
    The miracle of wireless
    Who invented the computer?
    The ever-shrinking transistor
    The surprise of search engines and social media
    Machines that learn
7. Prehistoric innovation 
    The first farmers
    The invention of the dog
    The (Stone Age) great leap forward
    The feast made possible by fire
    The ultimate innovation: life itself
8. Innovation’s essentials 
    Innovation is gradual
    Innovation is different from invention
    Innovation is often serendipitous
    Innovation is recombinant
    Innovation involves trial and error
    Innovation is a team sport
    Innovation is inexorable
    Innovation’s hype cycle
    Innovation prefers fragmented governance
    Innovation increasingly means using fewer resources rather than more
9. The economics of innovation 
    The puzzle of increasing returns
    Innovation is a bottom-up phenomenon
    Innovation is the mother of science as often as it is the daughter
    Innovation cannot be forced upon unwilling consumers
    Innovation increases interdependence
    Innovation does not create unemployment
    Big companies are bad at innovation
    Setting innovation free
10. Fakes, frauds, fads and failures 
    Fake bomb detectors
    Phantom games consoles
    The Theranos debacle
    Failure through diminishing returns to innovation: mobile phones
    A future failure: Hyperloop
    Failure as a necessary ingredient of success: Amazon and Google
11. Resistance to innovation 
    When novelty is subversive: the case of coffee
    When innovation is demonized and delayed: the case of biotechnology
    When scares ignore science: the case of weedkiller
    When government prevents innovation: the case of mobile telephony
    When the law stifles innovation: the case of intellectual property
    When big firms stifle innovation: the case of bagless vacuum cleaners
    When investors divert innovation: the case of permissionless bits
12. An innovation famine 
    How innovation works
    A bright future
    Not all innovation is speeding up
    The innovation famine
    China’s innovation engine
    Regaining momentum
Afterword
Sources and further reading
Index
Acknowledgements
About the Author
By the same author
About the Publisher