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How Innovation Works: And Why It Flourishes in Freedom
Pasteur’s explanation came about as a result of a serendipitous accident.
Matt Ridley • How Innovation Works: And Why It Flourishes in Freedom
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
Matt Ridley • How Innovation Works: And Why It Flourishes in Freedom
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
Matt Ridley • How Innovation Works: And Why It Flourishes in Freedom
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
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At the time nobody would have noticed or realized its significance;
Matt Ridley • How Innovation Works: And Why It Flourishes in Freedom
It runs mostly on trial and error, the human version of natural selection. And it usually stumbles on great breakthroughs when looking for something else: it is heavily serendipitous.
Matt Ridley • How Innovation Works: And Why It Flourishes in Freedom
A freshly dead body is, to all intents and purposes, identical to a living one, except that on an invisible scale, its ability to keep protons the right side of membranes has suddenly ceased.
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
Or maybe they have made it less safe. Consider the Fukushima disaster of 2011. The design at Fukushima had huge safety flaws. Its pumps were in a basement easily flooded by a tidal wave, a simple design mistake unlikely to be repeated in a more modern design. It was an old reactor and would have been phased out long since if Japan had still been bu... See more