i want to suggest that there's an upside of innovation that stands beyond all that, which is just the human enterprise of it. The opportunity to express ourselves, to do what steve jobs call, put a dent in the universe. I was utoo utopian about the international social media 20 years ago. i thought this internet world was going to enable us to m understand each other's views and points of view. But one could argue that taking a negative view of innovation, that is just a bunch of gadgets. And we had brooks on the program talk about in an essay he wrote,. He suggests he imagines a newton i travelling forward in timeand you hand him a telephone.
What's the difference between invention and innovation? Could it be that innovation--the process of making a breakthrough invention available, affordable, and reliable--is actually the hard part? In this week's EconTalk episode, author Matt Ridley talks about his book How Innovation Works with EconTalk host Russ Roberts. Ridley argues that we give too much credit to inventors and not enough to innovators--those who refine and improve an invention to make it valuable to users. Along the way, he emphasizes the power of trial and error and the importance of permissionless innovation.