Invention and Innovation

This is Smil's insightful and fact-filled jaunt through the history of human invention, and it is driven by impatience with the hype that so often accompanies innovation. He offers a clear-eyed corrective to the overpromises attached to everything from new cures for diseases to artificial intelligence. Even after an idea has travelled some distance along the trajectory from invention through development to application, he reminds readers, we may never get anything real to deploy. Worse still, an invention that does succeed in being introduced may then be marked by underperformance, disappointment, demise or outright harm. Drawing on a wide scientific and historical range, Smil first distinguishes invention from innovation, which he treats as a distinction that matters. The book then looks at inventions that did not dominate as promised, among them the airship, nuclear fission and supersonic flight, and separately at those with disastrous consequences, including leaded petrol, DDT and chlorofluorocarbons. Most importantly, he closes with a wish list of the inventions we most urgently need in order to confront the staggering challenges of the twenty-first century. The result is a sobering account of the folly that attends human ingenuity, and of how expectations might be better aligned with reality.

Written from the catalogue listing at Blackwell's reproducing the MIT Press publisher's synopsis.

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