Invention and Innovation

Vaclav Smil, prolific author of several best selling book, published "Invention and Innovation: A Brief History of Hype and Failure" (2023) with MIT Press. The book presents a three-part approach to assessing invention and innovation, which examines: (1) inventions that works but we later learned caused harm - leaded gasoline, DDT, CFCs; (2) Inventions we expected to scale but did not - airships, nuclear fission, supersonic flight; (3) inventions that did materialize at all - hyperloop, nitrogen-fixing cereals, controlled nuclear fusion. The framework is useful for thinking about invention and innovation. The chapters are relatively basic overviews of the nine innovation types. The book is accessible and readable, which helps to reach a broad audience. Book ends with some reality checks on innovations, in particular with regard to energy and climate change. A few notes:

"I will adopt a more general approach to inventive failures by focusing on the fact that the flow of fundamental and enormously successful inventions that have created modern civilization during the past 150 years has been accompanied by a frustrating lack of progress in many key areas, as well as on the innovations that, to put it charitably, did not do as well as initially expected. In this book I examine three notable categories of these innovation failures: unfulfilled promises, disappointments, and eventual rejections." (p. 11-12)

"The history of tetraethyl lead is, in the first place, the story of failed public health measures: if the known risks had been taken into account, there would not have been, decades later, a failed invention and the need to ban the compound's use. CFCs and DDT carry different, much more sobering but also expected lessons: human interventions in Earth's envi- ronment often carry delayed, complex risks, so far removed from the initial concern and so far beyond the readily conceivable complications that only time and the accumulation of events will make us aware of those unexpected but highly consequential impacts." (p. 23)