If innovation can be bottled into a formula, it wouldn’t be that unique or valuable. Irrespective of the title, I was interested in getting more perspectives of it, especially from Matt Ridley whose Rational Optimist I enjoyed a while ago (review here).

The book is structured somewhat differently from other books. The author spends a lot of time on specific innovation in different areas for two thirds of the book. The rest of the time is in summarizing the theorizes. The case for the second part of the title, is never fully made, but I was not that keen on that aspect anyway. The stories are interesting and the summaries are okay, but I was left expecting more. I wish the book had been clearer about who it was intended for. That might have helped direct it better.