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

If innovation is a gradual, evolutionary process, why is it so often described in terms of revolutions, heroic breakthroughs and sudden enlightenment? Two answers: human nature and the intellectual property system. As I have shown repeatedly in this book, it is all too easy and all too tempting for whoever makes a breakthrough to magnify its import... See more

Democracy does not exist and free speech is impossible. I repeat: the stories of innovation that I have documented in this book teach a lesson that it relies heavily on freedom.

Yet in effect what he was doing was not invention, so much as innovation: turning ideas into practical, reliable and affordable reality.

Kendrick and Eldering received very little recognition for this work, turning down most requests from the media even decades later, and little financial reward. They shared their methods and formulae freely all over the world. They did everything right: chose a vital problem, did the crucial experiments to solve it, worked with communities to test ... See more

Serendipity plays a big part in innovation, which is why liberal economies, with their free-roving experimental opportunities, do so well. They give luck a chance.

The history of innovation, laid out in the stories I have told here, reveals some surprisingly consistent patterns. Whether it happened yesterday or two centuries ago, whether it was high technology or low, whether it was a big device or a tiny one, whether real or virtual, whether its impact was disruptive or just helpful, a successful innovation ... See more

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.