How Innovation Works – by Matt Ridley
Recommendation: 8/10. Date read: 9/17/20.

Examines the role of innovation—an often misunderstood concept—in the modern age. He discusses the environmental conditions that promote innovation, how it differs from “invention,” and how our idea of a single moment of brilliance as the key to technological advances is flat out wrong. For those in technology who are on the ground floor doing the work, the message will be refreshing. Ridley emphasizes how iteration is the key to innovation—you have to get as many reps in as possible to turn an invention into something that’s both practical and affordable for widespread use. The story of innovation is one of incremental improvements and the freedom to exchange, experiment, imagine, invest, and fail.

See my notes below or Amazon for details and reviews.

My Notes:

Simultaneous Invention:
“Again and again, simultaneous invention marks the progress of technology as if there is something ripe about the moment. It does not necessarily imply plagiarism. In this case, the combination of better metalworking, more interest in mining and a scientific fascination with vacuums had come together in north-western Europe to make a rudimentary steam engine almost inevitable.”

“It was impossible for search engines not to be invented in the 1990s, and impossible for light bulbs not to be invented in the 1870s. They were inevitable. The state of the underlying technologies had reached the point where they would be bound to appear, no matter who was around.”

Brilliance vs. Hard Work:
“Vanity: people prefer to be thought brilliant rather than mere hard-working.”

Ingredients of Innovation:
Tolerance of error is critical: “Innovation is itself a product, the manufacturing of which is a team effort requiring trial and error.”

“The main ingredient in the secret sauce that leads to innovation is freedom. Freedom to exchange, experiment, imagine, invest and fail; freedom from the expropriation or restriction by chiefs, priests and thieves.” 

Revolution vs. Evolution:
Gradual improvements = key to iteration. “The history of turbines and electricity is profoundly gradual not marked by any sudden step changes…It was an evolution, not a series of revolutions. The key inventions along the way each built upon the previous one and made the next one possible.”

Innovation is the “product of incremental tinkering and trial and error by several people, not of brilliant leaps if imagination by a genius.” 

“Innovation is not an individual phenomenon, but a collective, incremental and messy network phenomenon.”

“The idea of a single moment of inspiration, of the apple landing on young Isaac Newton’s head, stirs the soul, even if it turns out to be apocryphal. In contrast, the idea that innovation occurs in fits and starts, with one person adapting a concept already in use and another figuring out how to make a profit from it, has little appeal.” Marc Levinson

“There is no day when you can say: computers did not exist the day before and did the day after, any more than you could say that one ape-person was an ape and her daughter was a person.”

The Arch of Innovation:
“The story of the internal-combustion engine displays the usual feature of an innovation: a long and deep prehistory characterized by failure; a shorter period marked by an improvement in affordability characterized by simultaneous patenting and rivalries; and a subsequent story of evolutionary improvement by trial and error.” 

“The simplest ingredients—which had always been there—can produce the most improbable outcome if combined in ingenious ways…just through the rearrangement of molecules and atoms in patterns far from thermodynamic equilibrium.” 

Opposition to Innovation:
“Big companies are bad at innovating, because they are too bureaucratic, have too big a vested interest in the status quo and stop paying attention to the interests, actual and potential, of their customers. Thus for innovation to flourish it is vital to have an economy that encourages or at least allows outsiders, challengers and disruptors to get a foothold. This means openness to competition, which historically is a surprisingly rare feature of most societies.”

Other characteristics that are in opposition to innovation: an appeal to safety, a degree of self-interest among vested interests, paranoia among the powerful.