HOW INNOVATION WORKS
AND WHY IT FLOURISHES IN FREEDOM
MATT RIDLEY 4th Estate, 416pp, £20, ebook £9.99
Where does human innovation emerge from? Is it a flash in the pan or is it slow-cooked over generations of patient research? As Matt Ridley puts it in his new book, ‘Innovation is the most important fact about the modern world but the least understood.’ In the Sunday Telegraph, Sherelle Jacobs ran with the baton: ‘There may be no better time for a book on innovation than the middle of a pandemic,’ she wrote, citing Zoom calls as well as urgent vaccine research as products of the crisis. ‘But then Ridley lands an exciting blow: there is almost an eerie inevitability about innovation – as if it were directed by invisible cosmic law.’ Ridley himself observes that ‘innovation, like evolution, is a process of constantly discovering ways of rearranging the world into forms that are unlikely to arise by chance.’
In the Spectator, Rory Sutherland thought the book ‘wonderful’ and enjoyed the ’ranks of nameless collaborators’, the ‘unsung heroes’ who were namechecked. And in the Sunday Times, Luke Johnson praised a range beyond Silicon Valley: ‘This is a much more sweeping and thoughtful analysis, covering a wide range of human endeavours.’ Only Jon Gertner in the Washington Post was left unconvinced that Ridley’s concerns about the future of innovation were justified. ‘He can tell us only that “innovation is the child of freedom and the parent of prosperity” and “we abandon it at our peril”. But it is unclear who would actually advocate such an absurd position.’