How Innovation Works: And Why It Flourishes in Freedom

by Matt Ridley

Innovation, like evolution, is a process of constantly discovering ways of rearranging the world into forms that are unlikely to arise by chance – and that happen to be useful.

Whenever you see a successful business, someone once made a courageous decision. PETER DRUCKER

Vaccination exemplifies a common feature of innovation: that use often precedes understanding.

the Jellinek episode is a reminder that in the early years of the car industry, as in the early years of computers, mobile phones and many other innovations, the inventors thought they were developing a luxury good for the upper-middle classes.

One person may make a technological breakthrough, another work out how to manufacture it and a third how to make it cheap enough to catch on.

Technology is absurdly predictable in retrospect, wholly unpredictable in prospect.

Amara’s Law states that people tend to overestimate the impact of a new technology in the short run, but to underestimate it in the long run.

We expect too much of an innovation in the first ten years and too little in the first twenty, but get it about right looking fifteen years ahead.