How Innovation Works Quotes

“innovation is organic because it must be a response to an authentic and free desire, not what somebody in authority”
― Matt Ridley, How Innovation Works: And Why It Flourishes in Freedom

“Paul Krugman is a Nobel Prize-winning economist who in 1998 reacted to the growth of the internet, and the hype of the dotcom boom, with an article in Red Herring magazine entitled ‘Why Most Economists’ Predictions are Wrong’. He then proceeded to give a dramatic demonstration of his point by making what turned out to be a very wrong prediction himself: The growth of the Internet will slow drastically, as the flaw in ‘Metcalfe’s law’ – which states that the number of potential connections in a network is proportional to the square of the number of participants – becomes apparent: most people have nothing to say to each other! By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet’s impact on the economy will have been no greater than the fax machine’s.”
― Matt Ridley, How Innovation Works: And Why It Flourishes in Freedom

“In the search for a strong and permanent glue, Spencer Silver at 3M in Minneapolis found a weak and temporary adhesive instead. This was in 1968. Nobody could think of a use for it, until five years later a colleague named Art Fry remembered it when irritated by his place-markers falling out of a hymn-book while singing in a church choir. He went back to Silver and asked to apply the glue to small sheets of paper. The only paper lying around was bright yellow. The Post-it note was born.”
― Matt Ridley, How Innovation Works: And Why It Flourishes in Freedom

“Perhaps the most puzzling aspect of innovation is how unpopular it is, for all the lip service we pay to it.”
― Matt Ridley, How Innovation Works: And Why It Flourishes in Freedom

“Innovation often disappoints in its early years, only to exceed expectations once it gets going, a phenomenon”
― Matt Ridley, How Innovation Works: And Why It Flourishes in Freedom

“The chief way in which innovation changes our lives is by enabling people to work for each other. As I have argued before, the main theme of human history is that we become steadily more specialized in what we produce, and steadily more diversified in what we consume: we move away from precarious self-sufficiency to safer mutual interdependence. By concentrating on serving other people’s needs for forty hours a week – which we call a job – you can spend the other seventy-two hours (not counting fifty-six hours in bed) drawing upon the services provided to you by other people.”
― Matt Ridley, How Innovation Works: And Why It Flourishes in Freedom

“They give luck a chance. Innovation happens when people are free to think, experiment and speculate. It happens when people can trade with each other. It happens where people are relatively prosperous, not desperate. It is somewhat contagious”
― Matt Ridley, How Innovation Works: And Why It Flourishes in Freedom

“Serendipity plays a big part in innovation, which is why liberal economies, with their free-roving experimental opportunities, do so well.”
― Matt Ridley, How Innovation Works: And Why It Flourishes in Freedom

“And here is my starting point: innovation is the most important fact about the modern world, but one of the least well understood.”
― Matt Ridley, How Innovation Works: And Why It Flourishes in Freedom

“Innovation, then, means finding new ways to apply energy to create improbable things, and see them catch on. It means much more than invention, because the word implies developing an invention to the point where it catches on because it is sufficiently practical, affordable, reliable and ubiquitous to be worth using.”
― Matt Ridley, How Innovation Works: And Why It Flourishes in Freedom

“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.”
― Matt Ridley, How Innovation Works: And Why It Flourishes in Freedom

“Innovations come in many forms, but one thing they all have in common, and which they share with biological innovations created by evolution, is that they are enhanced forms of improbability”
― Matt Ridley, How Innovation Works: And Why It Flourishes in Freedom

“Improbable arrangements of the world, crystallized consequences of energy generation, are what both life and technology are all about.”
― Matt Ridley, How Innovation Works: And Why It Flourishes in Freedom

“If error is a key part of innovation, then one of America’s greatest advantages has come from its relatively benign attitude to business failure. Bankruptcy laws in most American states have allowed innovators to ‘fail fast and fail often’ as the Silicon Valley slogan has it. In some states, the ‘homestead exemption’ essentially allows an entrepreneur to keep his or her home if their business fails under Chapter 7 bankruptcy rules. Those”
― Matt Ridley, How Innovation Works: And Why It Flourishes in Freedom

“A recent survey found that 82 per cent of Americans think that over the next thirty years robots and computers will ‘probably or definitely do most of the work done by humans’ but that only 37 per cent think they will do ‘the type of work I do’: a big contradiction there.”
― Matt Ridley, How Innovation Works: And Why It Flourishes in Freedom