How innovation works : and why it flourishes in freedom / Matt Ridley.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Ridley, Matt, author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Diffusion of innovations--History.

Diffusion of innovations.

Technological innovations--Social aspects.

Technological innovations.

History.

Genre:

History.

Physical Description:

406 pages ; 24 cm

Edition:

First U.S. edition.

Place of Publication:

New York, NY : Harper, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers, [2020]

Summary:

Building on his national bestseller The Rational Optimist, 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.

Contents:

Machine generated contents note: 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.

Notes:

"Originally published as How innovation works: serendipity, energy and the saving of time in Great Britain in 2020 by 4th Estate, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers"--Title page verso.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 375-388) and index.

ISBN:

9780062916594

0062916599

OCLC:

1154312948