
How Innovation Works
And Why It Flourishes in Freedom
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Narrated by:
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Matt Ridley
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By:
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Matt Ridley
About this listen
Building on his national best seller The Rational Optimist, Matt Ridley chronicles the history of innovation, and how we need to change our thinking on the subject.
Innovation 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. Forget short-term symptoms like Donald Trump and Brexit, it is innovation itself that explains them and that will itself shape the 21st century for good and ill. Yet innovation remains a mysterious process, poorly understood by policy makers and businessmen, hard to summon into existence to order, yet inevitable and inexorable when it does happen.
Matt Ridley argues in this audiobook that we need to change the way we think about innovation, to see it as an incremental, bottom-up, fortuitous process that happens to society 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, not a matter of lonely genius. It is gradual, serendipitous, recombinant, inexorable, contagious, experimental, and unpredictable. It happens mainly in just a few parts of the world at any one time. 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, not with abstract argument, but from telling the lively stories of scores of innovations, how they started and why they succeeded or in some cases failed. He goes back millions of years and leaps forward into the near future. Some of the innovation stories he tells are about steam engines, jet engines, search engines, airships, coffee, potatoes, vaping, vaccines, cuisine, antibiotics, mosquito nets, turbines, propellers, fertiliser, zero, computers, dogs, farming, fire, genetic engineering, gene editing, container shipping, railways, cars, safety rules, wheeled suitcases, mobile phones, corrugated iron, powered flight, chlorinated water, toilets, vacuum cleaners, shale gas, the telegraph, radio, social media, block chain, the sharing economy, artificial intelligence, fake bomb detectors, phantom games consoles, fraudulent blood tests, faddish diets, hyperloop tubes, herbicides, copyright, and even - a biological innovation - life itself.
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Relaxed but packed with insight
- By Tad Davis on 02-14-20
By: Tamim Ansary
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The Secret to Attracting Money
- By: Joe Vitale
- Narrated by: Joe Vitale
- Length: 6 hrs and 8 mins
- Original Recording
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The potential to attract money and create abundant wealth doesn't reside in your job, your circumstances, or even the economy. It resides within you. Your mind is equipped with the natural ability to attract as much money as you want and need - at anytime, anyplace, in any financial climate, without struggle. You just have to know how to trigger it.
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What's blocking your from wealth?
- By Croix on 10-18-17
By: Joe Vitale
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Viral
- The Search for the Origin of COVID-19
- By: Matt Ridley, Alina Chan
- Narrated by: Gavin Osborn
- Length: 11 hrs and 16 mins
- Unabridged
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A new virus descended on the human species in 2019 wreaking unprecedented havoc. Nearly two years into the pandemic, the crucial mystery of the origin of SARS-CoV-2 is not only unresolved but has deepened. In this uniquely insightful book, a scientist and a writer join forces to try to get to the bottom of how a virus whose closest relations live in bats in subtropical southern China somehow managed to begin spreading among people more than 1,500 kilometers away in the city of Wuhan.
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A pivotal work in search of truth around the Covid19 virus in a world where facts got downgraded in favour of politics
- By Pal on 11-25-21
By: Matt Ridley, and others
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The Formula
- Unlocking the Secrets to Raising Highly Successful Children
- By: Ronald F. Ferguson, Tatsha Robertson
- Narrated by: Cynthia Farrell
- Length: 10 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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In The Formula: Unlocking the Secrets to Raising Highly Successful Children, Harvard economist Ronald Ferguson, named in a New York Times profile as the foremost expert on the US educational "achievement gap," along with award-winning journalist Tatsha Robertson, reveal an intriguing blueprint for helping children from all types of backgrounds become successful adults.
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would recommend
- By Marcia on 02-25-20
By: Ronald F. Ferguson, and others
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Pacific
- Silicon Chips and Surfboards, Coral Reefs and Atom Bombs, Brutal Dictators, Fading Empires, and the Coming Collision of the World's Superpowers
- By: Simon Winchester
- Narrated by: Simon Winchester
- Length: 14 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
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Best-selling author Simon Winchester offers an enthralling biography of the Pacific Ocean and its role in the modern world, exploring our relationship with this imposing force of nature. Winchester's personal experience is vast and his storytelling second to none. And his historical understanding of the region is formidable, making Pacific a paean to this magnificent sea of beauty, myth, and imagination that is transforming our lives.
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Political Asides Have Become Bombastic Didactic
- By Mark Patterson on 12-25-15
By: Simon Winchester
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A Thousand Brains
- A New Theory of Intelligence
- By: Jeff Hawkins, Richard Dawkins - foreword
- Narrated by: Jamie Renell, Richard Dawkins
- Length: 8 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
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For all of neuroscience's advances, we've made little progress on its biggest question: How do simple cells in the brain create intelligence? Jeff Hawkins and his team discovered that the brain uses map-like structures to build a model of the world - not just one model, but hundreds of thousands of models of everything we know. This discovery allows Hawkins to answer important questions about how we perceive the world, why we have a sense of self, and the origin of high-level thought.
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Starts out good, ends up a train wreck
- By Warren on 03-15-21
By: Jeff Hawkins, and others
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The Enlightenment of Bees
- By: Rachel Linden
- Narrated by: Madison Lawrence
- Length: 9 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
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At 26, apprentice baker Mia West has her entire life planned out: a Craftsman cottage in Seattle, a job baking at the Butter Emporium, and her first love - her boyfriend, Ethan - by her side. But when Ethan declares he “needs some space”, Mia’s carefully planned future crumbles. Feeling adrift, Mia joins her vivacious housemate Rosie on a humanitarian trip around the world funded by a reclusive billionaire.
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Very cheesy
- By Annon on 10-07-19
By: Rachel Linden
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A Radical Awakening
- Turn Pain into Power, Embrace Your Truth, Live Free
- By: Shefali Tsabary
- Narrated by: Shefali Tsabary
- Length: 15 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
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A Radical Awakening lays out a path for women to heal their psychic wounds and prepares them to discover their own powers to help heal others and the planet. Dr. Shefali helps women uncover the purpose that already exists within them and harness the power of authenticity in every area of their lives. The result is an eloquent and inspiring, practical and accessible book, backed with real-life examples and personal stories, that unlocks the extraordinary power necessary to awaken the conscious self.
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Idealistic views without tools
- By Just a Dad on 06-11-21
By: Shefali Tsabary
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Evolution Gone Wrong
- The Curious Reasons Why Our Bodies Work (Or Don't)
- By: Alex Bezzerides
- Narrated by: Joe Knezevich
- Length: 9 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
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From blurry vision to crooked teeth, ACLs that tear at alarming rates and spines that seem to spend a lifetime falling apart, it's a curious thing that human beings have beaten the odds as a species. After all, we're the only survivors on our branch of the tree of life. Why is it that human mothers have such a life-endangering experience giving birth? And why are there entire medical specialties for teeth and feet? In this funny, wide-ranging and often surprising book, biologist Alex Bezzerides tells us just where we inherited our achy, brilliant bodies in the process of evolution.
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Answers questions you haven't thought of yet!
- By Mike on 05-25-21
By: Alex Bezzerides
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Bottle of Lies
- The Inside Story of the Generic Drug Boom
- By: Katherine Eban
- Narrated by: Katherine Eban
- Length: 14 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
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From an award-winning Fortune reporter, an explosive narrative investigation of the generic drug boom that reveals the life-threatening dangers posed by globalization - The Jungle for pharmaceuticals.
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overbearing self-righteous indignation
- By VB on 01-13-20
By: Katherine Eban
What listeners say about How Innovation Works
Highly rated for:
Reviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- John
- 03-10-23
Enjoyably Informative
I’m surprised to see others distressed by the key theme that innovation thrives in freedom. The evidence appears overwhelming. It is acknowledged that some areas, such as drugs, need some measures to assure quacks don’t proliferate. The stories of innovation provide a fresh set of details in an entertaining fashion on subjects that many, including me, have heard though only the “bumper-sticker” version of. Ridley’s views on what helps and what hurts innovation may be debatable, but his points are presented in a such a lively and humorous fashion, that even the most casual or skeptical reader/listener should enjoy this book.
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- Amazon Customer
- 05-26-23
Bussin
Best piece of literary work I have read in a decade. Brilliant writer and story teller.
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- Anonymous User
- 12-03-23
Why innovation stops working.
The best chapter to me is about how innovation came to slow down. How a previous breakthrough might stop the next leap in technology to flourish.
Read it twice in one week.
And will read it again soon.
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- Mr.Vegemite
- 09-13-20
Not much new in this book
This book is a history lesson on innovation and a high level discussion on the nature of innovation. If you have spent a lot of time in and around innovation you will be nodding your head but you won’t find much in the way of a-ha I didn’t realize that’s how it works.
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- Keith
- 05-03-22
A feast for thought
Very thought provoking. The real innovation is a cultural process to balance reasonable safety with openness to interactive innovation in quick to market products. There is real risk of catastrophic outcomes that cannot be ignored.
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- Randall Parker
- 10-09-22
This is an excellent book
Ridley spans across many topics, weaving together evolution of species with evolution of technologies. He explains that the famous inventors of history were often succeeding by making many incremental improvements on top of many incremental improvements of others. Patents can slow that process by preventing the combination of ideas of multiple people. He explains the growing regulatory forces that slow innovation, costing all of us in many ways.
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- kamen zakov
- 03-23-23
Very informative
A great summary of libertarian thinking about how the world has evolved;.The conservative views will offend some people, but the fact remains that freedom is a driving force of innovation and human progress.
The arguments are at times difficult to follow, and repetition is a little omnipresent. Otherwise a great read .
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- Bill Bochynski
- 06-10-20
"Light" and fun, but "heavy" and valuable.
Lightweight, accessible, but significant.
Annnd...an economics lesson.
I will read this again!
Thank you.
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6 people found this helpful
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- Dennis M Danzik
- 06-09-20
Great book! 5 Stars!
Well written. A sprinkling of anti patent, anti intellectual property political editorial due to Ridley’s libertarian beliefs. Ridley also refers to Darwin as an innovator, and Darwin’s findings as complete. Huge yawn. That said, this is the best narrative book on invention and innovation that I have ever read. Ignore the IP stuff (Ridley even maintains copyrights on his books), this book is a Winner!
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1 person found this helpful
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- CSB
- 07-06-21
fascinating work!
in depth, exciting, and overall highly recommended to anyone interested in technology and human progress
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