How Innovation Works: An illuminating journey through historical innovation and invention

by Matt Ridley

Potatoes are the most productive major food plant, yielding three times as much energy per acre as grain. They were domesticated about 8,000 years ago in the high Andes, above 3,000 metres, from a wild plant with hard and toxic tubers. Quite how and why people managed to select a nutritious plant from such a dangerous ancestor remains shrouded in the mists of time,

More recent history teaches the same lesson. Innovation flourished in cities that traded freely with other cities, in India, China, Phoenicia, Greece, Arabia, Italy, Holland and Britain: places where ideas could meet and mate to produce new ideas. Innovation is a collective phenomenon that happens between, not within, brains. Therein lies a lesson for the modern world.

Innovation is recombinant Every technology is a combination of other technologies; every idea a combination of other ideas. As Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee put it: ‘Google self-driving cars, Waze, Web, Facebook, Instagram are simple combinations of existing technology.’ But the point is true more generally. Brian Arthur was the first to insist on this point in his 2009 book The Nature of Technology: What It is and How It Evolves. He argued that ‘novel technologies arise by combination of existing technologies and that (therefore) existing technologies beget further technologies.’ I defy the reader to find a technological (as opposed to a natural) object in his or her pocket or bag that is not a combination of technologies and of ideas. Looking at my desk as I write I see a mug, a pencil, some paper, a telephone and so on. The mug is perhaps the simplest object but even it is glazed ceramic with a printed logo and combines the ideas of baking clay, glazing, printing, adding a handle and holding tea or coffee in a receptacle. Recombination is the principal source of variation upon which natural selection draws when innovating biologically. Sex is the means by which most recombination happens. A male presents half his genes to an embryo and so does a female. That is a form of recombination, but what happens next is even more momentous. That embryo, when it comes to make sperm and egg cells, swaps bits of the father’s genome with bits of the mother’s in a process known ...

In the same way, innovation in one technology borrows whole, working parts from other technologies, rather than designing them from scratch. The inventors of the motor car did not have to invent wheels, springs or steel. If they had done, it is unlikely that they would ever have produced working devices along the way. The inventors of modern computers took the idea of vacuum tubes from the ENIAC and the idea of storable programs from the Mark 1.