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

by Matt Ridley

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 ...