My Latest Book, How Innovation Works, is Officially Available - Matt Ridley

I am delighted to be launching my new book How Innovation Works this week, which has officially arrived in the United States and Canada.

If you want to read it now, you can get the Kindle or audiobook (read by myself!) instantly.

But hardcover orders are even better! More on that below.

As always with a book, a year or two of writing and rewriting, plus many more years of thinking, comes down in the end to one day of releasing the finished book, as free of errors as possible, for anybody in the world to read and review, to like and loathe. It’s like bringing up a baby eagle, then one day setting it free to soar high in the sky – or so I hope.

This one has been unusual, however, because of the Covid pandemic.

I would normally be in New York for the launch of the US edition getting ready to do a round of radio interviews and speeches and signing sessions. Instead I am trying to achieve the same thing locked down in my own home. I am growing hoarse from podcasting, and it often feels weird giving a talk to a blank screen, but I am getting great feedback from those who have read the book.

I think the topic is timely: innovation is what will defeat this virus, whether in vaccines, antiviral drugs or track-and-trace apps. The need to unleash innovation to defend humanity against future pandemics is clear, and the failure to do so enough in the past is worrying. It’s evident too that innovation is a collaborative process which depends on the exchange of ideas, as I argue in the book, and whose benefits reach us all through the exchange of goods and services that we call trade.

The world really is all in this together.

Virtual North american Book Tour