How Innovation Works: And Why It Flourishes in Freedom

under the second law of thermodynamics, that entropy cannot be reversed, locally, unless there is a source of energy – which is necessarily supplied by making something else even less ordered somewhere else, so the entropy of the whole system increases.

At the time nobody would have noticed or realized its significance;

Lawrence Hargreaves, an early Australian aviation experimenter, wrote in 1893 that his fellow enthusiasts must root out the idea that by ‘keeping the results of their labours to themselves, a fortune will be assured them’.

Manufacturing in space may never pass this test, because of its cost.

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

By 2050, I am convinced, we could have stemmed the rise of allergies and autoimmune disease, largely by recognizing that the cause lies in the lack of parasites, and the lack of diversity of microflora in our guts, to the presence and resistance of which our immune system is adapted.

the ban on potatoes), praised the nutrient contents of potatoes. In 1789, on the brink of revolution and against a background of widespread hunger, the king ordered Parmentier to produce another

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

The physicist Geoffrey West of the Santa Fe Institute made a remarkable discovery about cities.