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 […]
Tags: #Failure #Innovation #Invention #Invention and Innovation #Vaclav Smil
Compiling five years of weekly essays, “Numbers Don’t Lie: 71 Things You Need to Know About the World” (2020) is one of Vaclav Smil’s many books. The author is prolific and influential (apparently Bill Gates has read all of his nearly 40 books, and Gates promoted this book in particular). He is also the academic […]