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.

The more ordered and improbable our world becomes, the richer we become, and, as a consequence, the more disordered the universe becomes overall.

Innovation often disappoints in its early years, only to exceed expectations once it gets going, a phenomenon I call the Amara hype cycle, after Roy Amara, who first said that we underestimate the impact of innovation in the long run but overestimate it in the short run.

innovation is itself a product, the manufacturing of which is a team effort requiring trial and error.

Parsons’s design that keeps the lights on, navies afloat and airliners aloft.

Parsons turbine engine

The history of turbines and electricity is profoundly gradual, not marked by any sudden step changes.

To single out clever people who made the difference along the way is both difficult and misleading. This was a collaborative effort of many brains. Long after the key technologies had been ‘invented’, innovation continued.

The development of civil nuclear power was a triumph of applied science, the trail leading from the discovery of nuclear fission and the chain reaction through the Manhattan Project’s conversion of a theory into a bomb, to the gradual engineering of a controlled nuclear fission reaction and its application to boiling water.

The problem is cost inflation. Nuclear plants have seen their costs relentlessly rising for decades, mostly because of increasing caution about safety. And the industry remains insulated almost entirely from the one known human process that reliably pulls down costs: trial and error. Because error could be so cataclysmic in the case of nuclear power, and because trials are so gigantically costly, nuclear power cannot get trial and error restarted.

Interesting reason for the decline of nuclear energy. Ack of ability to trail and error

Also, technologies pushed on the world by governments, before they are really ready, sometimes falter, where they might have done better if allowed to progress a little more slowly.

The discovery of so-called high-temperature superconductors and the design of so-called spherical tokamaks have probably at last defused the old joke that fusion power is thirty years away – and has been for thirty years.

The key location of the slick-water fracking breakthrough was the Barnett shale near Fort Worth, where an entrepreneur named George Mitchell, born to a Greek goatherd father, had grown rich supplying Chicago with gas.

So trial and error was vital to innovation in fracking. Steinsberger made a series of lucky mistakes, failing many times along the way. And when he had found the formula, he did not know why it worked.

ignoring the contribution of lesser mortals. I have chosen to tell the stories of Newcomen, Watt, Edison, Swan, Parsons and Steinsberger, but they were all stones in an arch or links in a chain.

For the vast majority of history, argues John Constable, the supply of energy, from wheat and wind and water, was just too thin to generate complex structures on a sufficient scale to transform people’s lives. Along came the heat-to-work transition of 1700 and suddenly it became possible to create ever more improbable and complex material structures from the harnessing of fossil fuels with their huge energy yield on energy invested.

Innovation produces complex structures on a massive scale that transforms peoples lives.

In due course inoculation with smallpox itself – later known as variolation – was replaced by the safer but similar practice of vaccination, that is to say, using a related but less dangerous virus than smallpox, an innovation usually credited to Edward Jenner.

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

Pasteur began to realize that vaccination worked by a less virulent organism triggering an immune response that worked against a more virulent one.

Dr John Snow was trying, largely in vain, to persuade the authorities that cholera was caused by dirty water, not smelly air – the ‘miasma’ theory then in vogue.

Fifty years after Pasteur’s summer holiday led to a fortuitous insight into the mode of action of vaccination,

The story of penicillin reinforces the lesson that even when a scientific discovery is made, by serendipitous good fortune, it takes a lot of practical work to turn it into a useful innovation.

With Sarah Stewart she had done a groundbreaking experiment to show that cancer could be transmitted from a tumour in a mouse to a hamster, rabbit or guinea pig, by a virus, the SE polyoma virus (the ‘S’ standing for Stewart and the ‘E’ standing for Eddy) – a momentous biomedical discovery.

SV40 DNA has been detected in human cancers, especially mesotheliomas and brain tumours, where it may have acted as a co-factor alongside other causes. Saying this remains unpopular to this day.

Case against immunization. Seems there is valid proof that this caused cancer inducing. DNA to be injected into human body.

This beautifully simple, carefully designed, experiment, known as ‘Darriet et al. 1984’, became famous in the small world of malaria and insect control, though it has never achieved the celebrity it deserves in the popular media.

The impregnated bednet is the magic bullet against the disease and its vectors.

That it could challenge the canals and the stagecoaches to carry people and cargo long distances just did not occur to anybody: an illustration of a great truth about innovation, that people underestimate its long-term impact.

The story of the screw propeller shows all the usual elements of an innovation: a long prehistory, simultaneous breakthroughs by two rivals, then incremental evolution over many years.

Important for blockchain

changing the behaviour of human beings in so many far-reaching ways that the automobile, not the aeroplane, is the twentieth century’s representative technology, as the steam engine was the nineteenth’s.

There is little doubt that somebody would have got planes into the air within the first decade of the twentieth century even without the Wrights.

An innovation that was inevitable because of the supporting technologies i.e., motors

Finding materials for compressors and turbine blades that could withstand immensely high pressure and red-hot temperature while rotating at high speed was a tall order. As was the case with the steam engine in the 1700s, and is the case with nuclear fusion today, innovation in materials is vital to realizing an advance that can be conceived but not built.

Why commercial airliners did not immediately pick up pace

Indeed, the main design for jet engines today uses Griffith’s axial flow, whereas Whittle used centrifugal flow.

Like radar and the computer, the jet is often thought to be a product of wartime inventiveness.

In America, you are now at least 700 times more likely to die in a car, per mile travelled, than in a plane.

More generally, it is the widespread use of dull, low-tech but vital practices such as ‘crew resource management’ techniques, and checklists galore, with cross-checking between crew members, and a culture of challenge, that have made the big difference since the 1970s.

The simplest ingredients – which had always been there – can produce the most improbable outcome if combined in ingenious ways.

Deterred by such fears, continental Europeans and North Americans only slowly came to like growing and eating potatoes. Indeed, the potato may have spread more rapidly in India and China in the 1600s than in Europe. It took to the Himalayas especially well, being reminded no doubt of the Andes.

Fritz Haber’s 1908 discovery of how to fix nitrogen from the air to make ammonia, by reacting it with hydrogen in the presence of a catalyst under pressure, stands as one of the key innovations of all time.

Marconi read about this and began to think there might be applications, in wireless telegraphy, to signal Morse messages without cables.

The computer, as we know it, has four indispensable ingredients to distinguish it from a mere calculator. It must be digital (in particular binary), electronic, programmable and general purpose – that is, capable of carrying out any logical task, at least in principle.

Walter Isaacson concludes that the first machine to meet all these criteria is the ENIAC, the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer, which began operating towards the end of 1945 at the University of Pennsylvania.

Turing’s remarkable mathematical paper ‘On Computable Numbers’, published in 1937, was the first logical demonstration that a universal computer, capable of doing any logical task, could exist.

Yet Turing’s ideas were ethereal and mathematical. More practical was the precocious Master’s thesis of Claude Shannon, an MIT student who worked at Bell Labs, also in the summer of 1937.

Johnny von Neumann, the hyper-intelligent and gregarious Hungarian, whose name is forever attached to the architecture of the modern computer, and who was Turing’s mentor at Princeton. In June 1945 von Neumann wrote the most

von Neumann’s ‘First Draft’ paper heavily drew upon, perhaps even plagiarized, the thinking and writing of Aiken’s deputy, the formidably talented Grace Hopper. Given that Hopper deserves much credit for the idea of program subroutines, as well as the compiler,

developed Kevlar, also serendipitously and also at Dupont. An expert on polymers who had joined the firm in 1946, she stumbled on a new form of aromatic polyamide that could be spun into a fibre. Persuading a reluctant colleague to spin the gunky fibre into a textile, she discovered that it was stronger than steel, lighter than fibre-glass and heat-resistant.

‘Google self-driving cars, Waze, Web, Facebook, Instagram are simple combinations of existing technology.’

Recombination is the principal source of variation upon which natural selection draws when innovating biologically. Sex is the means by which most recombination happens.

Innovation happens, as I put it a decade ago, when ideas have sex.

Darwinians are beginning to realize that recombination is not the same as mutation and the lesson for human innovation is significant. DNA sequences change by errors in transcription, or mutations caused by things like ultraviolet light. These little mistakes, or point mutations, are the fuel of evolution.

That is to say, every point mutation must improve the organism or it will be selected against. Wagner argues that sudden shifts of whole chunks of DNA, through crossing over, or through so-called mobile genetic elements, are necessary to allow organisms to leap across these valleys.