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3.9(13)

How Innovation Works

Building on his bestseller, Matt Ridley chronicles the history of innovation, and how we need to change our thinking on the subject.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. 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.

‘Ridley is spot-on when it comes to the vital ingredients for success’ Sir James Dyson


Author:

  • Matt Ridley

Narrator:

  • Matt Ridley

Format:

  • Audiobook

Duration:

  • 13 h 10 min

Language:

English

Categories:

  • Nonfiction
  • Business

More by Matt Ridley

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  3. How Innovation Works : And Why It Flourishes in Freedom

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  4. The Evolution of Everything : How Ideas Emerge

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  5. The Red Queen : Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature

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  6. Genome : The Autobiography of a Species In 23 Chapters

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  7. The Rational Optimist : How Prosperity Evolves

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  • 8 books

    Matt Ridley

    Matt Ridley is a bestselling author. His books include Genome, The Rational Optimist and How Innovation Works, among others and collectively they have sold over a million copies, been translated into 31 languages and won several awards.

    Read more

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Excellent4.3 out of 5