Orvil Wright Did Not Have a Pilot's License

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Sagway: The degree to which you have to get permission to go off and innovate in certain areas has become a real problem. He says the clinton administration deliberately set out to pass some really astonishingly libertarian legislation through congressand that paved the way for commerce. Sagway: It was kind of inevitable once people invented the search engine, it's obvious now but no one predicted its importance at the time.

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.