Fun little stories and pop takes and tales on innovation.

Ridley is your favorite dinner guest, full of fascinating stories that quickly veer from one point to the next and are offered in a haphazard order. Which is fun at a dinner party. The advantage of the rapid-fire storytelling is to mask the wild contradictions and unsupported claims that he tosses in there. Still, at some point one begins to wonder why we should listen to him beyond the amusing anecdotes.Fundamentally, Ridley argues for a free and completely unfettered landscape into which innov...

How Innovation Works is an inspiring and thought-provoking review of the history of human innovation with a goal of illustrating three principles. First, that important innovations tend to arise from many people improving incrementally upon the work of others. In other words, that the singular inventor's "Eureka!" moment is largely a myth. Second, that recent regulatory hurdles have hindered innovation, particularly in Europe. And finally, that the net impact of intellectual property laws has be...

Quick, fun, and educational read. Matt Ridley covers a familiar and well-trodden territory that deals with history, impact and serendipity of various inventions and innovations. But unlike many others, well-exemplified by Tim Hartford and his “Fifty Inventions That Shaped the Modern Economy”, Ridley doesn’t mind getting a little dirty. There are plenty of politically charged tangents in the book such as nuclear energy, GMOs, and genetic engineering, as well as controversy-fertile subjects such a...

What a delightful and insightful book. Matt Ridley explains the colourful history of innovations and upends some common preconceptions about how they come up. The book contains several key lessons: 1) Innovation is mostly a result of team effort, co-discovery, serendipity, step by step refinement, aimless tinkering, and endless trial-and-error learning. 2) Innovation strives in a free society where permissionless innovation is encouraged. 3) You cannot plan for innovation but you can encourage i...

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

How Innovation Works: Serendipity, Energy and the Saving of Time (2020) by Matt Ridley is a very good book that looks at how innovation has arisen in recent history and what makes it work. Ridley defines innovation as different from invention, which is the creation of something new and describes innovation as getting something to market that people actually use and that has an impact on society. The book emphasizes how innovation almost always gradual, it's done by teams, it's mostly not from a

I liked the overall themes and discoveries of the book. It did feel like it could have been a 3 page Medium post rather than a 200 page book, though. A little boring & drawn out at times.

Ridley’s books are always deeply insightful and unconventional. This book is no different. Innovation:1. Happens randomly and unpredictably2. Many failures but a few great breakthroughs 3. Often happens simultaneously across different countries and continent, but usually attributed to the most successful inventor4. 1% inspiration, 99% perspiration5. Mostly done by practical people such as mechanics and other tinkerers and seldom by professors 6. Science mostly comes after the invention7. All are...

Interesting review of the history of innovation that captures the commonalities which bring it to life. The book provoked much thought on the pre-conditioned beliefs I hold, such as the idea of the innovator and the role of luck in the whole concept. My only critique is that parts of the book seem to be subjective to the authors own political beliefs.

If innovation can be bottled into a formula, it wouldn’t be that unique or valuable. Irrespective of the title, I was interested in getting more perspectives of it, especially from Matt Ridley whose Rational Optimist I enjoyed a while ago (review here). The book is structured somewhat differently from other books. The author spends a lot of time on specific innovation in different areas for two thirds of the book. The rest of the time is in summarizing the theorizes. The case for the second part...

Innovation has been the buzzword with leaders of developing nations in the past couple of decades. They see it as the magic wand that could catapult them from a lower-income, lower-technology nation to a richer, more prosperous one. A lot of this belief has its roots in the creative technologies of the mid-1990s in Silicon Valley, California. Innovations, such as the World Wide Web, the Mosaic internet browser, and VoIP/communication technologies, brought the immense power of the internet, impro...

A good book, though not quite as innovative (sorry) or eye-opening as The Rational Optimist. A lot of this book - the first 2/3 or so - is devoted to recounting in great detail different stories of innovation. Throughout these stories, Ridley occasionally reflects on the nature of innovation, drawing lessons about how it occurs as why. But it's not really until the last third of the book that he begins to tie these ideas together in any kind of systematic way. Even then, the "why it flourishes i...

I was at first quite ambivalent about this book, but ultimately I think it's one of the best books I've ever read. That's not to say I think Ridley is always right. I think some of his arguments are weaker than others, especially: 1) that basic research is only valuable in that it enriches our lives (and it *rarely* leads to innovation), 2) his central conflation that all government is equal to poor regulations stifling innovation and 3) the idea he finishes on - an odd, motivational correlation...

As he usually does, Matt Ridley looks at problems from a different angle. WSJ just ran an excerpted essay from his upcoming book: https://www.wsj.com/articles/innovati...Excerpts:The expiration of patents often results in a burst of innovation, as with 3-D printing, where the recent lapse of three key patents has resulted in notable improvements in quality and a drop in price. The historian Anton Howes, of the Royal Society of Arts in London, points out that the French government bought out Loui...

The book essentially consists of two halves: the first half deals with stories of how innovation came about in fields such as energy, health, technology etc. and the second half, based on the stories, tries to come up with theories for how innovation works. It is a decent conceit -- to grip the reader with rousing tales of scientific and technological breakthroughs and then, using these stories, tease out the mechanism through which innovation works. The problem is, the conceit fails on both cou...

People love Matt Ridley. I almost feel bad for rating this so low, but he is really in tight with the old guard, Dawkins et al. I thought this would blow my mind. It didn't. It had the potential to, if newer and more progressive science were included, but Ridley is very scientifically conservative. This is a book about innovation; and yet, it is not very innovative itself. I like that he included life, but even this is nothing new. It was an a pretty standard history of innovation, written about...

Patents and copyright are justified with a question, "Why would people innovate if they didn't expect to gain?» At first glance this argument sounds like common sense; however, if we dig a little we quickly understand that this is "lawyer logic". That is, it is a story that conveniently has lawyers legitimacy reinforced. Economics teaches us to think in a rather different manner. The narrow interest versus broad interests, specifically for two sides that have equivalent interests, the side that

I've read quite a few books about how innovation works over the past few years, and this is one of the better ones. If it's a topic that interests you, pick it up. Unfortunately, I'd forgotten to mark it as read.. it's been a while, so I forget exactly what I got from this and not others... but when reviewing the highlights, they are all very familiar. That's a really good sign.

This book has a lot in common with Andrew McAfee's More From Less, and indeed both authors cite each other directly. They're both very quick reads, touching shallowly on many topics and relying extensively on research done by other scholars, making fairly broad points. But Ridley pulls off that balance much better overall. The book is mostly composed of historical vignettes about invention and innovation, but while none of them are individually very detailed, they're carefully summarized in a wa...