The Greatest Innovations of Our Time

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Innovation is not a matter of going and sitting in a darkened room with a wet towel round your head, cause you're such a genius. So many of the great innovations of history were not done by scientists. They were done by practical people trying to solve a problem that they were grappling with. It's a slowish process that is highly trial and error. And because of that, they often built on each other's gradual improvements before getting to the stage of technology we become familiar with through history.

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.