How Innovation Works: And Why It Flourishes in Freedom

The most astonishing case is the electric light bulb, the invention of which was independently achieved by twenty-one people. There may have been a bit of snooping by some of these into the work of the others, and collaboration between them in a few cases, but mostly it is hard to find any evidence they even knew of each other’s work. Likewise, the... See more

Google, likewise, tolerates and even encourages failure. Its moonshot subsidiary, known as ‘X’, launched in 2009, sets out to find big, disruptive new business opportunities. Most of these fail. The high-profile launch of Google Glass, a miniature screen and voice-activated camera attached to a pair of eyeglasses, was X’s most public and most expen... See more

Innovation is the child of freedom and the parent of prosperity.

The West may be slowly forgetting to allow this to happen through bureaucratic strangulation, but China will surely stifle it through political authoritarianism.

Democracy does not exist and free speech is impossible. I repeat: the stories of innovation that I have documented in this book teach a lesson that it relies heavily on freedom.

In a famous essay called ‘I, Pencil’, Leonard Reed pointed out that a simple pencil is made by many different people, some cutting trees down, others mining graphite, others working in pencil factories, or in marketing or management, yet others growing coffee for the lumberjacks and managers to drink. Amid this vast team of collaborating people, no... See more

I am no prophet, and I have in any case argued that it is impossible to forecast the progress of innovation.

The truth is that autonomous vehicles are possible but in fairly limited circumstances, and that this may not change as fast as people think, in the real world. Huge amounts of driver assistance will surely come, or are here already, so that cars can detect and avoid obstacles, cruise on motorways and freeways, parallel-park and warn the driver of ... See more

Amara’s Law states that people tend to overestimate the impact of a new technology in the short run, but to underestimate it in the long run.