Book Notes: "How Innovation Works: And Why It Flourishes in Freedom" by Matt Ridley

Plus a brief book review

Chris Dixon, noted web3 analyst and General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz once wrote:

“The next big thing always starts out being dismissed as a toy.”

This is a key idea from Clayton Christensen’s disruption theory — a seminal paper on on how innovation develops.

But according to popular science writer Matt Ridley, this isn’t enough. In his book How Innovation Works: And Why It Flourishes in Freedom, he systematically expounds on Christensen’s ideas… To show why simply improving existing products or inventing new things isn’t enough to produce truly disruptive innovation.

Here are a few notes I had from the book (plus my honest review of it at the end):

I. Innovations are toys that became tools

In Innovation, Ridley quotes the Nobel Prize-winning economist Edmund Phelps who defines innovation as a new method or product becomes a new practice somewhere in the world. To Phelps, an innovation is merely a toy until it catches on and becomes, as Ridley writes, “sufficiently practical, affordable, reliable, and ubiquitous to be worth using.”

II. The real innovator of the printing press

In 1450, Johan Gutenberg combined the individual inventions of the printing press, paper, and movable type to invent printing — and unknowingly ushering in an era of enlightenment and knowledge (as well as political and social upheaval in the West).

Because of this most people think Gutenberg was the inventor of printing.

But while he was the inventor of the printing press, he wasn’t the innovator who brought into popular use.

To Ridley that titles belongs to Martin Luther. Luther used printing as a way to reach the masses, producing short, readable pamphlets in more colloquial German, rather than Latin. “By 1519,” Ridley writes, “[Luther] had published 45 works in almost 300 editions and was Europe’s most published author.”

III. The real inventor of the light bulb

In February 3rd 1879, Joseph Wilson Swann passed an electric current through a glass bulb that contained a carbon filament, illuminating a room of 500 people, and demonstrating the first light bulb before Thomas Edison.

And he wasn’t the only one.

According to Ridley, 21 different people could lay plausible claim to having invented incandescent light bulbs before the end of the 1870s.

So why do we remember Edison, not Swann?

Edison knew something that Swann and the other didn’t: that the innovation — not the lightbulb — itself was the product. He knew it wasn’t enough to come up with a new invention and patent it; a new invention needed to be distributed into the market to catch on.

So Edison went into business with Swann who had the most thorough work and the best patents around the lightbulb. He then combined it with a system for generating and distributing electricity. Most importantly, Edison pushed to make the incandescent bulbs more reliable, as a direct challenge to — and eventually triumph over — the oil lamp and the gas lamp.

IV. Thomas Edison: The innovation is the product

To Thomas Edison, the innovation itself is the product.

He set up his New Jersey laboratory in 1876 to do what he called, “the invention business.” He assembled a team of 200 craftspeople and scientists. He stuffed his workshop with materials, tools, and books.

As Ridley notes in Innovation, Edison was obsessed with two things: finding out what the world needed, then inventing ways to meet it.

Not the other way around.

Edison pursued inventions as solutions to existing, valuable problems, not as fanciful thought experiments.

As a result, this mindset made it financially and creatively worthwhile to invest time, money, and manpower to test 6,000 plan materials to find the exact right kind of bamboo for the filament of a lightbulb, to pursue 50,000 experiments to develop the nickel-iron battery, and to register 400 patents within 6 years.

Edison is an innovator, not by genius but by experiment.

My review

I won’t write a review of every book I read… I disliked this one so much that I had to review.

This might come as a surprise.

But my notes aside, I think Innovation is a lazily put together, disorganized mess and as a result, a painful slog to read.

The introduction and first chapter pulled me in with the promise of a multidisciplinary approach to learning about the principles of innovation. But I hit a wall a quarter of the way through while reading about the innovation of the potato. Then I hit another wall once I got to the chapter on prehistoric innovations because… Wait, why is this the 7th chapter, not the first chapter?

So maybe it’s my fault for not being interested in fertilizers and potatoes. But I kept reading.

And I realized halfway through that the issues wasn’t my lack of interest in tubers.

The book was just so poorly organized.

• It felt more like a series of blog posts. Each chapter had 4-5 examples of innovation, but each story could’ve stood alone. Maybe as an entertaining blog post.
  
  I know this. I’m a digital writer and I write blog posts and newsletter for a living.
  

  And standalone pieces are not what I’m looking for in a book.

  
  The author didn’t explicitly connect them to each other or to the overarching principles of the book. Instead, I was often left to connect the dots myself.

  
  You know it’s bad when the publisher could’ve cut an entire chapter on fraudulent innovation — all 25 pages of it — and I, the reader, wouldn’t have missed a thing.

• It had no story arcs. The first 230 pages are made up of stories of innovation from energy, food, public health, and computing. But instead of having a beginning, middle, and an end, each story was just a chronological retelling of every enthusiast, scientist, or engineer who ever touched the invention. I’ve seen resumes using the STAR method with more of a story arc than this book.

• It had the core lessons… in the middle? Like I alluded to above, the author didn’t get into the core ideas of the book until Chapter 8. Then two chapters later, launched into a list of failed innovations. Again, why?

Anyways, while I had high hopes for this book — I picked it up after a recommendation from Naval Ravikant — I was hugely disappointed. I prefer Robert Green’s style of weaving in bits and pieces of a handful of core stories to support the main themes of the book.

For comparison, Innovation took me almost an entire year of dipping in and out to finish. Robert Greene’s Mastery on the other hand, took me less than a month.

Now that is a masterclass in using stories to teach lessons, while giving the reader a satisfying and entertaining reading experience.

Overall, reading Innovation was a huge struggle for me.

The ideas in the book are sound, unique, and interesting, especially for someone with a tech background like me. But sadly, it was lazily put together and it just not a good book.

As a result, the ideas are not worth the tradeoff of hours I spent reading it.