History of Innovation
We've prepared a map of the exhibit floor of the Nose Creek Valley Museum in Airdrie, and added our innovation related insights to some items on the floor. On your next visit to the museum page through the InnoTour on your smartphone while you're still outdoors, then inside the museum -where reception is bad in the back room- your device can get the pages from its cache.
Papers:
Invention as a combinatorial process, Youn, Strumsky, Bettencourt, Lobo 2015
If you wonder if it's cheating to simply recombine basic technologies without inventing a new technology, the answer is no: you're far from alone and growth in innovation relies heavily on combining existing technologies in new/novel ways, and in refining technologies further into sub-categories of technologies.
Books:
Dynamism: The Values That Drive Innovation, Job Satisfaction, and Economic Growth, Edmund Phelps et. al. 2019
Follow on to Mass Flourishing (see below), with further research and analysis on the correlates and causal direction. They make a causal link between Modernist values and indigenous innovation.
Mass Flourishing: How Grassroots Innovation Created Jobs, Challenge, and Change, Edmund Phelps, 2013
From 1700s to current century, a look at the fluctuations and drivers of economic growth, in particular the correlates of indigenous and imported innovation, and how indigenous differs from exogenous and the Schumpeterian model. Modernist culture correlates.
The Innovators, Walter Isaacson, 2014
A romp through the history of computing, from the era of the Jacquard loom to the present day, examining the characters and how they interacted at inflection points in discovery and innovation, with a chapter summarizing the lessons learned:
- collaborative
- expanding prior ideas, snowball effect, 'ripeness'
- team diversity
- team physical proximity
- complementary team members: visionaries and operationals
- commons based peer production / request for comments
NonZero, Wright, 2000
- a gallop over the history of human civilization from the point of view of our advancing economic prosperity
Future of Innovation
Abundance, Diamandis & Kotler, 2012
- an optimistic look forward, at the same scale as NonZero