In How Innovation Works, Matt Ridley explains how and why innovation happens “when people are free to think, experiment, and speculate. It happens when people can trade with each other. It happens when people are relatively prosperous, not desperate. It is somewhat contagious. It needs investment. It generally happens in cities.”

Most innovation is a gradual process. It is also a team sport, as Ridley correctly suggests. Groups working in collaboration were teams. Other groups consisted on individuals working independently, with the efforts of each being of varying value to others.

Didn’t Thomas Edison invent the light bulb?

“Yes, he did. But so did Marcellinn Jobard in Belgium; and so did William Grove, Fredrick de Moleyns and Warren de la Rue (and Joseph William Swan) in England. So too did Alexander Lodygin in Russia, heinrich Gobel in Germany, Jean-Eugene Robert-Houdin in France, Henry Woodward and Matthew Evans in Canada, Hiram Maxim and John Starr in America, and several others. Every single one of these people produced, published, or patented the idea of a glowing filament in a bulb of glass, sometimes with a vacuum, sometimes with nitrogen inside the bulb, and all before Thomas Edison.”

Matt Ridley observes, “the striking thing about innovation is how mysterious it still is. No economist or social scientist can fully explain why innovation happens, let alone why it happens when and where it does. In this book I shall try to tackle this puzzle.”

Indeed he does. Bravo!

How Innovation Works: And Why It Flourishes in Freedom was published by Harper (May 2020).

I also highly recommend two other books: Jim McKelvey’s The Innovation Stack: Building an Unbeatable Business One Crazy Idea at a Time, published by Portfolio/Penguin (March 2020), and Alex Goryachev’s Fearless Innovation: Going Beyond the Buzzword to Continuously Drive Growth, Improve the Bottom Line, and Enact Change, published by Wiley (January 2020).