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How Innovation Works: And Why It Flourishes in Freedom
There is no day when you can say: computers did not exist the day before and did the day after, any more than you could say that one ape-person was an ape and her daughter was a person.
Matt Ridley • How Innovation Works: And Why It Flourishes in Freedom
Edison’s approach worked: within six years he had registered 400 patents. He remained relentlessly focused on finding out what the world needed and then inventing ways of meeting the needs, rather than the other way around. The method of invention was always trial and error. In developing the nickel-iron battery his employees undertook 50,000 exper... See more
Matt Ridley • How Innovation Works: And Why It Flourishes in Freedom
It is notable that during the early years of a new technology – the railway, for example, or the internet – far more entrepreneurs went broke than made fortunes.
Matt Ridley • How Innovation Works: And Why It Flourishes in Freedom
Innovation happens, as I put it a decade ago, when ideas have sex.
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
So who invented the motor car running on an internal-combustion engine? Like the steam engine and (as I will show later) the computer, there is no simple answer. Ford made it ubiquitous and cheap; Maybach gave it all its familiar features; Levassor provided crucial changes; Daimler got it running properly; Benz made it run on petrol; Otto devised t
... See moreMatt Ridley • How Innovation Works: And Why It Flourishes in Freedom
In a famous essay called ‘I, Pencil’, Leonard Reed pointed out that a simple pencil is made by many different people, some cutting trees down, others mining graphite, others working in pencil factories, or in marketing or management, yet others growing coffee for the lumberjacks and managers to drink. Amid this vast team of collaborating people, no... See more
Matt Ridley • How Innovation Works: And Why It Flourishes in Freedom
The astonishing safety record of the modern airline industry has been achieved, quite literally, by trial and error.
Matt Ridley • How Innovation Works: And Why It Flourishes in Freedom
Queen Elizabeth owned silk stockings. The capitalist achievement does not typically consist in providing more silk stockings for queens but in bringing them within the reach of factory girls in return for steadily decreasing amounts of effort.