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)

Turkish-American economist and recent Nobel prize winner, Daron Acemoglu, along with British-American economist and also recent Nobel prize winner, Simon Johnson, penned the 2023 book Power and Progress. Given the star power, one starts the book with high expectations. There are a number of books that survey the history of innovation, such as Ridley's 2020 How Innovation Works. In this case, the focus is inclusive innovation that benefits a broader number of people in society, as opposed to innovation that benefits a few (and potentially harms the majority). Like Ridley's book, it is a mass market book that tells stories of innovation. Also like Ridley's book, the book is general selects positive cases from the West and negative cases from the rest and ends up with quite normative or ideological takeaways, as opposed to findings rooted in the evidence from the book / drawn out from the examples on innovation that are surveyed (that coming from a reader who has not won a Nobel!). The key solutions proposed by the authors include: increase people power via unions, increase civil society action and organizing, create incentives for social good, break up big tech, reform taxes to align labor and capital, invest in people / workers, enhance data protection, and the need for government leadership. A few notes:

"There is reason to be hopeful because history also teaches us that a more inclusive vision that listens to a broader set of voices and recognizes the effects on every one is possible. Shared prosperity is more likely when countervailing powers hold entrepreneurs and technology leaders accountable-and push production methods and innovation in a more worker-friendly direction. Inclusive visions do not avoid some of the thorniest questions, such as whether the benefits that some reap justify the costs that others suffer. But they ensure that social decisions recognize their full consequences and without silencing those who do not gain." (p. 29)

"By the mid-nineteenth century; tens of thousands of middle-status Britons had formed the idea that they could rise substantially above their station through entrepreneurship and command of technologies. Other parts of Western Europe saw a similar process of social hierarchies loosening and ambitious men (and rarely women in those patriarchal times) wishing to gain wealth or status. But nowhere else in the world at that time do we see so many middle-class people trying to pierce through the existing social hierarchy. It was these meddling sort of men who were critical for the innovations and the introduction of new technologies throughout much of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Britain." (p. 166)

Matt Ridley's book How Innovation Works (2020) is a mass market book that offers a thematic run down of innovations (in health, energy, transportation, etc). The chapters are mostly brief descriptions, with little on the "so what?" of the innovation processes. When there are very interesting questions, such as simultaneous innovations in distant locations, these remain largely hanging. Nonetheless, this is an interesting read. A few notes:

"Innovation is the most important fact about the modern world, but one of the least well understood. It is the reason that most people today live lives of prosperity and wisdom compared with their ancestors, the overwhelming cause of the great enrichment of the past centuries. (p.4)

"Innovation happens when people are free to think, experiment, and speculate. It happens when people can trade with each other. It happens where people are relatively prosperous, not desperate. It is somewhat contagious. It needs investment. It generally happens in cities. And so on. But do we really understand it? What is the best way to encourage innovation? To set targets, direct research, subsidize science, write rules and standards; or to back off from all this, deregulate, set people free; or to create property rights in ideas, offer patents and hand out prizes, issue medals; to fear the future, or to be full of hope? You will find champions of all these policies and more, fervently arguing their cases. But the striking thing about innovation is how mysterious it still is. No economist or social scientist can fully explain why innovation happens, let alone why it happens when and where it does." (p. 6)

"If innovation is a gradual, evolutionary process, why is it so often described in terms of revolutions, heroic breakthroughs and sudden enlightenment? Two answers: human nature and the intellectual property system. As I have shown repeatedly in this book, it is all too easy and all too tempting for whoever makes a breakthrough to magnify its importance, forget about rivals and predecessors, and ignore successors who make the breakthrough into a practical proposition." (p. 243-244)

"The main ingredient in the secret sauce that leads to innovation is freedom. Freedom to exchange, experiment, imagine, invest and fail; freedom from expropriation or restriction by chiefs, priests and thieves; freedom on the part of consumers to reward the innovations they like and reject the ones they do not. Liberals have argued since at least the eighteenth century that freedom leads to prosperity, but I would argue that they have never persuasively found the mechanism, the drive chain, by which one causes the other. Innovation, the infinite improbability drive, is that drive chain, that missing link." (p. 359)

"Politicians should go further and rethink their incentives for innovation more generally so that we are never again caught out with too little innovation having happened in a crucial field of human endeavour. One option is to expand the use of prizes, to replace reliance on grants and patents." (p. 387) 

Dr. Calestous Juma's new book, "Innovation and its Enemies: Why People Resist New Technologies" (2016), explains that this is a book Dr. Juma has wanted to write since his early engagement with innovation. That includes his founding of the African Centre for Technology Studies in 1988, being a former Executive Secretary of the UN Convention on Biological Diversity and co-chair of the African Union's High-level Panel on Science, Technology and Innovation and his current role of Director of the Science, Technology and Globalization Project at Harvard. He is an avid Twitter user, for anyone interested to follow his work.

For some readers, this book is bound to be cause for (critical) self-reflection. For example, Juma opens with the introduction of mobile phones – technology that has potential health risks, yet has been universally adopted and enabled additional innovations in a range of sectors, from banking and health to education and communication. He contrasts that with biotechnology and transgenetic crops, which also has potential health risks, but "has been marked by controversy that resulted in international treaties negotiated to regulate trade" (p. 2). Juma explains that the book "argues that technological controversies often arise from tensions between the need to innovate and the pressure to maintain continuity, social order and stability" (p. 5). The book is about technology and innovation, but also the socio-cultural and economic structures that enable or deter innovation, and why these exist.

The book covers a range of different technological innovations (farm mechanization, printing press, coffee, margarine, electricity, refrigeration, recorded sound, transgenetic crops, and genetically engineered salmon). The focus is not for or against, or weighing costs and benefits, of technologies, rather it is the broader context within which these innovations exist that Juma focuses upon: "Many of these debates over new technologies are framed in the context of risks to moral values, human health, and environmental safety. But behind these genuine concerns often lie deeper, but unacknowledged, socioeconomic considerations. This book demonstrates the extent to which these factors shape and influence technological controversies, which specific emphasis on the role of social institutions' (p. 6).

Juma concludes each chapter with lessons learned about each innovation, ranging from policy to regulation and politics and economics. As such, it may have appeal to a range of audiences. Consider this reflection: "Margarine represents one of the best examples of incumbent industries using legislative instruments to curtail or extinguish new technologies" (p. 117). Or, "the case of refrigeration shows that, contrary to popular belief, regulation can serve as a stimulus for innovation. In this case, many of the advances that made it possible for consumers to access safe and mechanical refrigeration resulted from regulation and new standards" (p. 198). The historical cases are less contested, as the debates have long since ended. I found the last two examples Juma presents (transgenetic crops and genetically engineered salmon) particularly interesting as they are yet to be settled. While the presentation of the issues and Juma's broader work situates his own positionality, these two chapters explore multiple sides of the on-going debates (not only the pro/con positions, but also the challenges faced by regulatory bodies and economic impacts related to export markets). On these on-going debates, Juma concludes that as "the world leader in biotechnology research, innovation and commercialization, the United States could set an example in the regulation of biotechnology innovations to ensure that society derives the highest possible benefit from these technologies in the safest possible way" (p. 277-278).

One component of the argument that Juma do not entertain in much detail is that of choice, and here an interesting analogy could also have been drawn to transgenetic crops. For those opposed to GM food crops, one of the key issues is choice, and thus advocacy for labeling to have the option to purchase GM or not. Embedded within this debate is that GM crops cannot be contained entirely, and spread (and therefore entire bans are advocated). While there are important considerations to be addressed regarding these concerns, it is interesting that mobile phone technology was not given as a parallel: one can choose not to purchase a mobile phone, but it is almost impossible to avoid exposure to electromagnetic radiation because of societal choices (the level differs, as it would with labeling options that allow for a small percentage of GM to be present in non-GM items).

The book concludes with notes on leaders and leadership: "The next frontier of leadership will focus largely on how society is prepared to respond not only to global grand challenges but also to new social problems generated by technological advancement and engineering applications. Leaders will need to be more adaptive, flexible, and open to continuous learning. They will be called upon increasingly to take decisions in the face of uncertainty and amid controversy" (p. 285-286).