Jak fungují inovace - A proč se jim nejvíc daří ve svobodné společnosti – Ridley Matt (2022)

The new book by the renowned British zoologist and science popularizer follows the bestsellers The Rational Optimist and The Evolution of Everything, in which he describes humanity's journey from the Stone Age to contemporary prosperity. The fundamental factor in this journey is innovation, a mysterious and undervalued process that subtly shapes the history of human civilization and is analogous to biological evolution. Innovations fundamentally differ from inventions, as they do not create something entirely new, but rather transform existing inventions and ideas into reliable, practically usable, and mass-accessible things. It is a gradual, unpredictable, bottom-up process often accompanied by happy accidents. Innovations are also not the work of individuals but the product of collaboration and the exchange of ideas among many people. Through a series of stories, we will encounter innovations from the advent of agriculture to the steam engine, vaccination, social media, and the sharing economy. However, the very first and most important innovation, from the perspective of planet Earth, is the emergence of life itself.