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

4th Estate, 2020. — 416 p. — ISBN: 9780008334840.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 an innovation that will shape the twenty-first century. Yet innovation remains a mysterious process, poorly understood by policymakers 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 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 – from steam engines to search engines – how they started and why they succeeded or failed.Introduction: The Infinite Improbability Drive.
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.
Public health
Lady Mary’s dangerous obsession.
Pasteur’s chickens.
The chlorine gamble 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.
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.
Food
The tasty tuber.
How fertilizer fed the world.
Dwarfing genes from Japan.
Insect nemesis.
Gene editing gets crisper.
Land sparing versus land sharing.
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.
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.
Prehistoric innovation
The first farmers.
The invention of the dog.
The (Stone Age) great leap forward.
The feast was made possible by fire.
The ultimate innovation: life itself.
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.
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.
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.
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.
An innovation famine
How innovation works.
A bright future.
Not all innovation is speeding up.
The innovation famine.
China’s innovation engine.
Regaining momentum.Sources and further reading.