How Innovation Works: And Why It Flourishes in Freedom

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

Who was vaping’s innovator? The original inventor was a man named Hon Lik who devised the first modern electronic cigarette in order to stop himself smoking. Around the turn of the twenty-first century, he was working as a chemist at the Liaoning Provincial Institute of Traditional Chinese Medicine and smoking two packs of cigarettes a day. He want... See more

According to one estimate, per unit of power, coal kills nearly 2,000 times as many people as nuclear; bioenergy fifty times; gas forty times; hydro fifteen times; solar five times (people fall off roofs installing panels) and even wind power kills nearly twice as many as nuclear. These numbers include the accidents at Chernobyl and Fukushima. Extr... See more

Neither the founders of Yahoo! nor those of Google set out in search of search engines. The founders of Instagram were trying to make a gaming app. The founders of Twitter were trying to invent a way for people to find podcasts.

clearer. Innovation happens, as I put it a decade ago, when ideas have sex. It occurs where people meet and exchange goods, services and thoughts. This explains why innovation happens in places where trade and exchange are frequent and not in isolated or underpopulated places: California rather than North Korea,

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

Pasteur began to realize that vaccination worked by a less virulent organism triggering an immune response that worked against a more virulent one. Not that he understood yet the slightest thing about the human immune system. Science was beginning to catch up with technology.

It runs mostly on trial and error, the human version of natural selection. And it usually stumbles on great breakthroughs when looking for something else: it is heavily serendipitous.

Innovation, like evolution, is a process of constantly discovering ways of rearranging the world into forms that are unlikely to arise by chance