Everything has changed. That is the message we are repeatedly told by media and it is a message that is increasingly borne out by the evidence. As Sir Nicholas Kenyon, Managing Director of the Barbican Centre recently wrote, "...nothing will be quite the same again, nor should it be. The crisis has raised issues around our relationship to cities and the environment, travel, home working and our offer to local communities."
There is a sense that we are at a hinge moment which has the potential to have profound social and economic consequences. A moment that has risks, but also opportunity. There aren't any ready-made guide books to the post-covid world yet, but there are books that can help us chart out some of the features of the new working environment and suggest routes through its terrain.
Books like Daniel Susskind's recent A World Without Work provide an insight into how AI and atomisation is changing the employment landscape, while titles like Palaces for the People by Eric Klinenberg and Paul Mason's Clear Bright Future offer versions of how we might want to reconfigure society in the wake of technological change. These are all helpful in sketching out what we might come to expect over the coming months and years, but perhaps what we need now is to consider how we are thinking about these problems, to ensure our minds are flexible and adaptive to the challenges and opportunities ahead. We need to avoid jumping straight to readymade solutions. We need to learn to innovate. This is what Matt Ridley’s new book, How Innovation Works, sets out to achieve.
Ridley takes a broad, historical approach to his analysis, taking in examples from the energy industry, public health, transportation and computing to support his conclusions. Written in an approachable and accessible manner Ridley casts a wry eye over case studies like the development of manpowered flight, where the Wright brothers succeeded in getting airborne, despite lacking the substantial government subsidies and social standing of their rival Professor Langley. Or the story of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, a well-read and determined 18th century noble woman who bought back to England the Ottoman practice of inoculation, demonstrating on her own children its power to provide immunity against diseases like small pox. Against this radical approach to experimentation Ridley sets the current nuclear power industry, which he suggests has failed to thrive due to the (understandable) public reticence to atomic based risk taking.
From this collection of insightful and engaging examples Ridley draws a number of lessons. He suggests that innovation is a collective, collaborative and organic enterprise that can only thrive in a free society when it is allowed to develop solutions to genuine market needs, rather than centrally set government requirements. It requires 'a willingness to put in the hours, to experiment and play, to try new things, to take risks' and its vitality is constantly threatened by 'bureaucracy and superstition'.
What does this mean in practice? Ridley sets out quite clearly that innovation is generally a ‘bottom-up’ process. It is very rarely the work of one person, instead requiring extensive research and team-work. Ridley demonstrates that practical progress depends on a culture that nurtures experimentation, has light-touch yet effective operating systems and encourages challenge. As the author points out, these are the traits of a successful start-up enterprise that older, more established and often more bureaucratic businesses need to embed if they are to retain their competitive edge.
Ridley does have a distinctly libertarian approach to his subject and his aversion to practically any government regulation could be questioned by some. His overall conclusion, though, is compelling. "Innovation is the child of freedom and the parent of prosperity." Without it we face stagnating living standards, political division and cultural disenchantment. With it more people can lead healthy, fulfilling lives with a lighter impact on our planet's ecology. Everything may well have changed. Ridley’s thought provoking book challenges us to respond with a pragmatic and clear-sighted mindset.
