000			01727nam a22001937a 4500
999			_c75078 _d75078
020			_a9780008334819
050			_aT 173.8 R53 2020.
100			_aRidley, Matt
245			_a How innovation works / _cby Matt Ridley.
260			_aLondon: _b4th Estate, _c2020.
300			_a422 pages ; _c24 cm.
337			_atext
520			_aInnovation is the main event of the modern age, the reason we experience both dramatic improvements in our living standards and unsettling changes in our society. It is innovation that will shape the twenty-first century. Yet innovation remains a mysterious process, poorly understood by policy makers and businessmen alike. Matt Ridley argues that we need to see innovation as an incremental, bottom-up, fortuitous process that happens as a direct result of the human habit of exchange, rather than an orderly, top-down process developing according to a plan. Innovation is crucially different from invention, because it is the turning of inventions into things of practical and affordable use to people. It speeds up in some sectors and slows down in others. It is always a collective, collaborative phenomenon, involving trial and error, not a matter of lonely genius. It still cannot be modelled properly by economists, but it can easily be discouraged by politicians. Far from there being too much innovation, we may be on the brink of an innovation famine. Ridley derives these and other lessons from the lively stories of scores of innovations - from steam engines to search engines - how they started and why they succeeded or failed
526			_a303.4
650			_aEconomic development.
650			_aSocial change.
650			_aTechnological innovations.
942			_2lcc _cBK