How Innovation Works

Innovation is the main event of the modern age. It has caused dramatic improvements in our living standards and unsettling changes within our society. Forget short-term symptoms like Donald Trump and Brexit: they are symptoms of a larger ill, namely innovation itself. Innovation remains poorly understood by policymakers and businesspeople alike, yet irrevocable, inevitable, and inexorable when it does happen. Matt Ridley argues in this book that we need to change the way we think about innovation, seeing it as an incremental process happening for no particular reason but rather as a direct result of the human habit of exchange.