How Innovation Works
'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.
Stats for nerds
11recommend
17mentions
14people
2020–2024years
65% recommend29% neutral6% critical
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- The Discoverers: A History of Man’s Search to Know His World and Himself - Daniel J. Boorstin
How Innovation Works: And Why It Flourishes in Freedom - Matt Ridley
The Technology Trap: Capital, Labor, and Power in the Age of Automation - Carl Benedikt Frey
- Become a better story teller and persuader, and learn how to make better decisions and manage risk. A few books that helped me in no particular order …
The Science of Storytelling - Will Storr
Influence - Robert Cialdini
Thinking Fast and Slow - Daniel Kahneman
Antifragile - Nassim Taleb
How Innovation Works - Natt Ridley
The One Thing You Need to Know - Marcus Buckingham
Team of Teams - General Stanley McChrystal
- The book How Innovation Works by Matt Ridley changed my perspective on this. Originally I thought all innovation was like the dotcom era. Ridley attempts to show that there are times when it is not always clear what the final innovation will be.
- Top 2 so far:
The Washington book is a very detailed by clear overview of his life. Easy to follow (even for complex situations) and very week written.* Washington: A life by Ron Chernow * The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won by Victor Davis HansonThe WW2 book is amazing. Compares the countries fighting in around 20 different areas (technology, leadership, geography, aircraft) and says who is better and why.
Also very good:
* FDR by Jean Edward Smith * Master of the Senate by Robert A. Caro * The Penguin History of New Zealand by Michael King * The years of Lyndon Johnson 2 – Means of Ascent by Robert Caro * Blood, Sweat & Chrome: The Wild and True Story of Mad Max: Fury Road by Kyle Buchanan * Becoming Trader Joe: How I Did Business My Way and Still Beat the Big Guys by Joe Coulombe * How Innovation Works: And Why It Flourishes in Freedom by Matt Ridley * Yeager: An Autobiography by Chuck Yeager * The years of Lyndon Johnson: The Path to Power by Robert Caro * The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson * Termination Shock by Neal Stephenson * An Economist walks into a Brothel: And Other Unexpected Places to Understand Risk by Allison Schrager * The Devil’s Candy: The Bonfire of the Vanities Goes to Hollywood by Julie Salamon * Sam Walton: Made in America by Sam Walton - Nice one - didn't know that. Penicillin is maybe the most famous example? The Wizard and the Prophet (Mann) and How Innovation Works (Ridley) also show how combinations of these types of discoveries (many of them in different fields, being studied for other purposes, etc.) over multi-year periods often results in world-changing level outcomes.
- Books by Matt Ridley:
- The Evolution of Everything: How Ideas Emerge
- How Innovation Works
- Francis Crick: Discoverer of the Genetic Code
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