How Innovation Works

Matt Ridley

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English

Fourth Estate Ltd
16 September 2020

Business innovation

‘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.

By: Matt Ridley
Imprint: Fourth Estate Ltd
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions: Height: 240mm, Width: 159mm, Spine: 37mm
Weight: 650g
ISBN: 9780008334819
ISBN 10: 0008334811
Pages: 416
Publication Date: 16 September 2020
Audience: General/trade , ELT Advanced
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active

Matt Ridley received his BA and D Phil at Oxford researching the evolution of behaviour. He has been science editor, Washington correspondent and American editor of The Economist. He has a regular column in the Daily Telegraph. He is also the author of The Red Queen (1993), The Origins of Virtue (1996) and Genome (1999). Matt Ridley is currently the chairman of The International Centre for Life.

Reviews for How Innovation Works

Praise for Matt Ridley: 'What a superb writer he is, and he seems to get better and better.' Richard Dawkins, author of 'The Selfish Gene' 'Ridley has amassed such a weight of fascinating evidence and anecdote that the pages fly by' The Times '[The Rational Optimist is] a glorious defence of our species... a devastating rebuke to humanity's self-haters' Sunday Times 'No other book has argued with such brilliance against the automatic pessimism that prevails' Ian McEwan