Invention and Innovation: A Brief History of Hype and Failure —Vaclav Smil (Cambridge, MA, USA: MIT Press, 2023, 232 pp.)

Abstract

The book describes how innovations can produce unintended effects that may take years to appear. The author is a well-known scientist and policy analyst whose interdisciplinary research interests encompass energy, food, population, economic, historical, and public policy studies. The author offers a few words to distinguish between the notions of invention and innovation. “The meanings have a large overlap, but innovation is perhaps best understood as the process of introducing, adopting, and mastering new materials, products, processes, and ideas.” The book presents detailed descriptions of inventions that fall into three categories: 1) ones that delivered the advertised performance, but with undesirable follow-on consequences; 2) ones that were expected to dominate their markets, but never did; and 3) ones we would like to see succeed, but have not yet achieved their objectives. A final chapter examines current optimistic predictions of what technology could achieve and how fast these advances are likely to happen. It ends with a discussion of what types of innovation are really most needed.