19: How innovation works
Hey hey hey,
I’ve been interested in innovation and how it works for a long time now. I had previously read inventology, The innovators, and now reading the innovator’s dilemma talking about disruptive innovation vs sustaining innovations. Today I’d like to tell you about this recent book by Matt Ridley that I found quite interesting. I’ll tell you more.
Let me start by asking the question: What is innovation on a fundamental level?
Innovation,like evolution, is a process of constantly discovering ways of rearranging the world into forms that are unlikely to arrange by chance. Innovation, then, means finding new ways to apply energy to create improbable things,and to see them catch on
Left to their own devices, atoms and bits will never arrange themselves into innovations that help humanity. Innovation is similar to Douglas Adams' improbability drive, an engine of improbable outcomes fueled by wealth and perspiration. Several factors must be present in a society to fuel innovations:
Innovation happens when people are free to think, experiment and speculate. It happens when people can trade with each other. It happens where people are relatively prosperous, not desperate.
To expound on this, The author takes us on a history tour, behind the curtain of several innovations that changed how we live today like the evolution of Energy,fire, transportation, dogs, telecommunication, computers...
Reading about the condidtions under which inventions turned into innovations,we start to understand how innovation works, what impedes it, and what propels it forward. First we've got to understand that invention is different from innovation. There comes a time when the frontiers are reached and the times are ripe,so we see people in various parts of the world inventing more or less the same things. We could attribute it all to the genius of a one man, but never was this the case. The time is ripe for some invention, it shows up many times across the world, by virtue of attention paid by some to their field. But invention is only the beginning of the story. To innovate, that is, to provide something useful humans can use to improve their lives, you need to turn the invention into a viable product. Innovation,like invention, can fail if the time is not ripe. Since all innovations are subject to time, and will happen anyway in the future, it takes a man who is paying attention, and experimenting to detect an earlier opportunity and speed up the arrival of the said innovation. Again and again, the author tries to pound in the idea that innovations don't come out of thin air, or in the brain of a genius. Innovators take excisting ideas and improve them. They may combine different ideas and turn them into something useful. You can not attribute the invention of the steam engine, or the telephone,or the computer to any one person. It is more complicated than that. One person invents something,some other person gets inspired by this invention,makes something better, and maybe these persons would meet to bounce off ideas off each other and come up with better designs or what have you. Later an entrepreneur will show up at time and turn an invention into a product anyone can use. Ideas evolve over time through the sum total of input from a litany of inventors.
A lot of factors slowed down innovations in the past,and still do today: the patent system; intellectual property and copyrights are impediments to innovation. Most of the innovators of yore wasted huge amounts of money and time defending their patents in court where they could have been speeding things up for the benefit of all. Obvisously, authoritarianism and centralization impede innovation. If every city was decentralized,innovations will occur more frequently. Strict regulations stymie innovations. The more the regulations are loosened the faster innovations arrive. In an innovative society, Failure should be tolerable so that more experiments could be done. Innovation often get attacked by lobbying existing incumbents and takes a lot of time to be adopted by the people themselves. Change is naturally hard for everyone.
At the end of the book, the author warns us of the decline of the amount of new businesses being formed in the US, and the rise of innovations in China, and india and what that might portend. All in all,worth reading if you're interested in knowing about how innovation happens and how we can speed it up.