Cover Image: How Innovation Works

How Innovation Works

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I originally requested this book as I was testing out the auto-approval process for our international customers so I could advise them on how to get up and running with it, and sent them a link/widget to download this book so that they could be auto-approved too. Seems to have worked!

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Matt Ridley's take on innovation and how it has shaped the lives of billions is fascinating. I've already recommended it to several of my friends. It's true that necessity is the mother of all invention and innovation, and this book explains so many things we today take for granted, and how they were born of necessity.
A great read that I will be revisiting regularly.

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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. This is a fascinating, information-rich and thought-provoking read with plenty of inspirational stories to help fuel your fire and a tonne of statistics and interesting anecdotes throughout. Encompassing and addressing a wide range of instances in which innovation takes place, how it takes place and how important it is for human advancement and modernity, Ridley has penned an insightful, eye-opening read. Highly recommended.

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Very elaborated history of innovation, which is different from invention, because it is the turning of inventions into things of practical and affordable use to people.

So long as humans apply ideas, there will be innovations.

The author provides really interesting stories and different innovation fields. He represents people behind them, because innovation is a team enterprise, it takes trial and error.

And despite the abundant evidence that it has transformed almost everybody's lives for the better, people mostly and at first distrust them.

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A really sluggish book to read sadly. There are some gripping stories inside, but it doesn't have a gripping driver to it.

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For readers familiar with Matt Ridley’s comment pieces in The Times, this book will cover some familiar ground, albeit fleshed out with much more detail and many more examples. The author’s canvas, in terms of timescales and distance is ambitious and well integrated, and he presents a largely convincing argument for an environment characterised by low regulation and decentralised authority as a necessary condition for the promotion of innovation and the accompanying economic progress.

The author rarely admits of the validity of alternative views and, to be fair, offers evidence to undermine many of the challenges to his world-view that have been put forward, For the most part, for example, he is dismissive of, and provides some evidence against, the view that the government is well-placed (or even, in some political belief systems), best-placed) to sponsor innovation.. He has little truck with any opinion that the government has a clue over how to ‘pick winners’, as is sometimes suggested. In this regard, it would, perhaps, be helpful to remind Mr Ridley not to confuse anecdote with data. Selective choices of spectacular government-backed failure - R100 vs R101 airships, for example - are interesting but it would be more instructive to also hear of examples other than nuclear weapons, where government backed innovation has succeeded.

Whatever the balance that individual readers reach over the extent to which Matt Ridley’s analysis correctly Identifies both problems and solutions, this book offers many challenges to humankind, for relentless innovation is responsible for keeping us all fed and provided, for the most part, with essentials. If Matt Ridley is only even partially correct mankind in general, and the Western democracies in particular, are facing ever increasing problems in maintaining the kinds of progress we have been used to. In his well argued opinion, environments favouring innovation are being burdened with ossified bureaucracy and regulations designed to favour the status quo at the expense of innovation. Highly recommended.

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An excellent, thought-provoking read. Not everyone will agree with the author regarding GM foods, although I do, but on the whole this story of invention and innovation should be on everyone's book shelf. Apart from the insight into the innovative process, many aspects of its history demonstrate how governments and dictators have hijacked innovative developments for their own, self-serving ends, and how all too often established businesses fight to exclude the newcomer. It begs the question of at what point, an innovative, outward looking business turns into a defensive, conservative quasi-monopoly determined to resist anything that might compete with their cosy cartel. For example, the extent to which established (mostly German) vacuum cleaner manufacturers conspired to keep Dyson out of their market by ensuring that product standards favoured their own relatively outdated products. But I've been guilty of that too!

A great book.

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How Innovation Works is an incredibly informative, educational read. I really enjoyed it and have learned so much more about modern day inventions from this book.

Thank you to NetGalley for providing me with an Advance Readers Copy in exchange for an honest review.

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