Readable, harmless. Solid run-through of most of the generally cited innovation examples, plus some new ones I hadn't heard of before, and written in a breezy magazine-article style.
Group with "Prophet of Innovation," Thomas K. McCraw's excellent biography of Joseph Schumpeter, and George Gilder's book "Spirit of Enterprise."
There are some examples here and there where it seems the author lacks command of the topic at hand yet still speaks breezily and authoritatively about it. But also the author offers readers some truly interesting historical examples as well as ways of conceptualizing innovation generally that really get you thinking about the topic. See for example the unusually interesting way of thinking about innovation as an enhanced form of improbability, a type of evolution on steroids. Or considering the steam engine "autocatalyzing" improvements in itself: as steam engines drained coal mines of water, it cut the cost of coal, which made energy and materials for the next generation of steam engines cheaper and easier to make, which catalyzed another cycle of wider steam engine uses, improvements and developments.
Worth remembering the "Amara hype cycle": we usually overestimate the impact of innovation in the short run, but we almost always underestimate the impact in the long run. See for example the internet, and how we mocked failed retailers like Pets.com (and even Amazon itself) during the internet's first decade, only to see entire industries digitized and disintermediated by online retail by its second decade.
It's striking, also, how easy it is to support a visibly beneficial innovation, but if we can't see an obvious benefit right away, it's all too easy to imagine only negative consequences that occur from most innovations--including a threat to the status quo.
Chapter notes:
Ch 1: Energy
The development of the steam engine, through unknown mechanisms and different inventors to different degrees culminating in Watt's innovation on the Newcomen engine, where he added a separate condenser, massively improving the efficiency of the machine.
Discussion of the incandescent bulb and artificial lighting and an ironic truth of government interference in innovation. The US government decided it would force fluorescent bulbs onto the market by banning incandescent bulbs, but ironically this was a bare few years before a far better replacement came along (from the private sector of course): LED lighting. This reminds me in a big way of a similar and sad example where the US government funded and built the gigantic canal system across New York State shortly before canals were made useless and pointless by the railroad.
Ch 2: Public Health
Smallpox, variolation followed by vaccination. How "use often precedes understanding" (we don't understand why something works, just that it does work, so we go ahead and use it). See for example Louis Pasteur (with his chickens) discovering the use of a weakened strain of a microbe for vaccination that worked by triggering an immune response that worked against virulent strains. And yet he had absolutely no understanding about how the human immune system worked!
Dr. Pearl Kendrick and her partner Grace Elderling, developing a vaccine for pertussis, making no money or fame from it, merely saving hundreds of thousands of lives.
Penicillin, and Squibb concluding that it was not practicable, ironically.
Ch 3: Transport
Distinguishing between the originator of an idea and the practical improver of that idea.
Steam locomotives seen as useless and unreliable relative to horses until the Napoleonic conflict drove up the price of horses and for hay, driving up a search for a substitute, and then thus improvement in steam locomotives.
Critics citing rumors that these "infernal machines" might go at 10 or 12 mph.
Gradual tinkering, trial and error and small incremental steps by many people, not some great leap by one solitary genius.
How the Wright brothers were not believed by scientific "experts" nor the media, and even how history was rewritten to favor a different inventor (actually a non-inventor of flight since this other guy's plane was a failure!) when the Smithsonian decided to have a museum display of the invention of air flight excluding the Wright brothers' plane.
Ch 4: Food
* The potato
* The Haber-Bosch nitrogen fixing process to produce fertilizer
* Dwarf wheat developed via seed crossing from Japan and the United States then exported to Mexico and (ironically against strong government opposition) to Indian and Pakistan. Then dwarfing used on rice and other crops to get more healed and less lodging of the stem under the weight of the grain.
* Ag biotech which began in the 1930s (!) with the discovery that bacteria could be used to add a gene to plants.
* Bt crops having a halo effect: farms in the area around a crop grown with Bt crops have reduced pest problems too. Organic farms who happen to be near these farms therefore operate better and with fewer pests!
* CRISPR invented by a obscure scientist in Spain that nobody had ever heard of.
* Lots of examples of elites, authorities ignoring or rejecting (or mocking) significant developments from people they saw as nobodies who were outside the circles of power at the time.
Ch 5: Low Technology Innovation
* Indian/Arabic decimal numbering and the use of 0. Something that, bizarrely, reached Western Civilization very late (AD1200-ish). You couldn't really multiply, do algebra or accounting in the Roman numeral system. Fibonacci showed merchants how to use this arithmetic and transactions.
* The S-bend/U-bend (or water trap) in toilets and pipes to block smells of sewage.
* Corrugated iron/steel
* Shipping containers, which disintermediated enormous port costs and delays for loading and unloading.
* Wheeled suitcases! "The lesson of wheeled baggage is that you often cannot innovate before the world is ready. And that when the world is ready, the idea will already be out there, waiting to be employed."
* Innovation in food, both recipes, cuisines, combinations and commercialization. Re McDonald's: "Eventually its popularity came to earn the snobbish rage of cultural commentators. There can be no greater accolade."
* The sharing economy: Airbnb, Uber, et al: low-tech ideas grafted onto the connectivity of the internet, none of which were seen or thought of when the internet was launched. Massive efficiencies gained via sharing innovations: as an example cars stand idle for 95% of their lives for example, thus sharing systems massively improve utilization efficiencies of an installed base of resources.
Ch 6: Communication and Computing
"There is a law about Moore's law. The number of people predicting the death of Moore's Law doubles every two years."
--Peter Lee, Microsoft
Telegraph and Morse
Marconi and "wireless Morse", then radio.
The development of a computer, a process so incremental and gradual, and so networked and cross-fertilized that there is no moment or place where it can be argued that the computer came into existence.
(Gordon) Moore's Law, and the striking fact that even the fact that we knew Moore's Law never changed Moore's Law! If you knew that processing power would double two years from now at the same cost, why wouldn't you be able to leap ahead? This is a good example of how innovation is incremental, and you have to get to each incremental stage to work out how to get to the next stage.
The early, earnest, egalitarian days of Silicon Valley. [It's interesting to see how they've evolved into completely non-egalitarian and non-innovative era today.]
AI and its various teething problems.
Ch 7: Prehistoric Innovation
"There is no great innovation, from fire to flying, that has not been hailed as an insult to some god."
--J.B.S. Haldane
Farming going from being an impossibility, because of the Pleistocene climate, to being mandatory in the next epoch. Also co-evolution of humans and the plants and animals they farmed: specific milk producing cattle and lactose tolerant humans for example. Or the domestication of the dog and the evolutionary value of "tameness."
Stone tool making
Interesting example of Tasmania having a stone age people in the modern era, and that it had given up or even lost technologies over time. Kind of like how the kiwi bird lost the ability to fly once it no longer "needed" it to survive.
Fire, cooking, and majors changes in human physiology, especially brain size.
Life itself as the primary innovation.
Ch 8: Innovation's Essentials
Gradual, different from invention (see the joke of the beaver and the rabbit looking up at the Hoover dam: "no, I didn't build it myself," says the beaver, "but it's based on an idea of mine."), serendipitous or lucky, recombinant of various ideas, involves trial and error, is a team sport, is inexorable (not "great man" based), has a hype cycle (the Amara hype cycle), uses fewer resources (rather than more) to do more, etc.
Ch 9: The Economics of Innovation
An interesting insight right here from the author: that the presumption that "government funds most innovation" (or that centrally directed government actors produce innovation), is essentially creationism! Innovation simply cannot be "directed" like this, it's a thing that actually happens via evolution, luck, randomness, the individual actions of individual tinkerers.
Most of the rest of the ideological discussion here is highly predictable. The author breaks little new ground. In fact the rest of the book from here on out is largely forgettable and skip-able.
Ch 10: Fakes and Failures
Few insights here: just regurgitations of things like Google, Amazon's policies of "fail more."
Ch 11: Resistance to Innovation
The weakest chapter so far. Devolving a bit here into logical incoherence, retrospective condescension and emotional incontinence. Not really understanding the precautionary principle (that it is designed to protect us from unknown unknowns), overly earnest about Golden Rice, etc. He's less conversant in certain topics here and it shows.
Ch 12: An Innovation Famine
The final chapter concludes with the authors own semi-utopian vision of the future (perhaps dystopian depending on your perspective) and some bromides of how China could out-innovate the West, followed by treacly quote about stick-to-it-iveness from Thomas Edison.