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  • How Innovation Works

  • And Why It Flourishes in Freedom
  • Written by: Matt Ridley
  • Narrated by: Matt Ridley
  • Length: 12 hrs and 34 mins
  • 4.8 out of 5 stars (65 ratings)

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How Innovation Works

Written by: Matt Ridley
Narrated by: Matt Ridley
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Publisher's Summary

Building on his national best seller 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. 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 audiobook 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.

©2020 Matt Ridley (P)2020 HarperCollins Publishers
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What listeners say about How Innovation Works

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Best listen that I have had in a very long time!

This book is a must listen/read for all that care about how inovation works and how we can allow it to flourish. Its role in helping to deliver solutions and prosperity throughout the world. A better understanding of this process will allow us to help foster and encourage positive change that can do more to move real solutions and hope to more all over the planet.

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More Innovation.

More innovation & freedom is good. Less regulation is better. A good book detailing all the breakthroughs by innovation & capitalism. Well written and narrated!

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I’m hopeful

While some case studies are more interesting than others, the engaging ones really drive home Matt’s overarching point. It times you are certainly awed by human ingenuity and adaptation. While there is reason for pessimism, this book left me hopeful humanity can rebound and flourish in the process. I will say I wish there was more commentary on the politics of innovation and a deeper dive into both innovation specific policy and economic policy that helps or hinders innovation but this book was a good start.

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A Must Read!

Great story telling, narrating, well written, true facts, thought provoking and another home run by Matt!

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Matt Ridley is a good story teller

There were lots of interesting stories. I enjoyed this book start to finish. I will be buying gift copies.

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Worthwhile for a Modern Thinker

He manages to bring together disparate locations and scientific ideas and put them into important human context.

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