How Innovation Works

Serendipity, Energy and the Saving of Time

By: Matt Ridley

Narrated by: Matt Ridley

Length: 13 hrs and 10 mins

Publisher's summary

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.

©2019 Matt Ridley (P)2019 HarperCollins Publishers Limited

Critic reviews

"What a superb writer he is, and he seems to get better and better." (Richard Dawkins, author of The Selfish Gene)

"An insightful and charming exploration of questions that range from the truly profound (How does our species capture energy to stave off decay and death?) to the merely fascinating (Why did it take us so long to invent the wheeled suitcase?)" (Steven Pinker, Johnstone professor, Harvard University, and author of Enlightenment Now)

"From the Stone Age to smartphones and from farming to fission, Matt Ridley demonstrates with a plethora of examples how innovation has changed and, for the most part, improved the human condition, despite repeated resistance and frequent failure. Given the freedom of thought that innovation needs, he argues, we can ensure the survival of the planet. We abandon it or constrain it at our peril." (Sir Tim Laurence, chairman of English Heritage)

Insights through stories.

Mr Ridley has given us amazing insights into what changes the world. This is the kind of work that should be on the shelf of everyone who wants to do something new, which should be everyone.

How do we make this a compulsory reading for all in business and government bureaucracies and in academic ivory towers?

Everyone should read it

Everyone should read it, especially politicians and decision makers. One of the best book od 2020. Brilliant.

Exceptional

This is probably the best book I have read on the subject. Will surely go back to it soon. Highly recommended!

Insightful book but didn’t lived up to my expectations

I found this book from Naval Ravikant’s podcast. There he spent 1:30 hours to praise this book. Although I learned a lot from How Innovation Works, but due to Naval’s adamant recommendations, I expected more. BTW, this book gives you a historical perspective to think about innovation.