Innovation—the word conjures up images of bright, enthusiastic people excitedly discussing ideas that will make them rich or famous and of television ads that portray companies where innovation is on every employee’s lips. Governments and universities talk about it endlessly—how can we encourage it and get people to think outside the box? How can we make it part of the corporate modus operandi? Western societies have come to consider it as virtually synonymous with progress and prosperity. Innovation is seen as an essential part of modern life.

One of the main reasons I wrote this book is that when I read historians’ works on technology, creativity, and economics, I found their discussions of the causes and conditions for innovative activity to be unsatisfying. As an engineer working with highly talented, innovative people, I felt these discussions seemed remote from what I was seeing on a daily basis. I wanted to clearly understand the conditions in a society that supported and encouraged innovative activity. If they were properly identified, then t should be possible to look back in history and explain why some societies were more innovative than others. One should then be able to apply these conditions to today’s societies and institutions and formulate  suggestions for encouraging innovative thinking at every level: in government, in schools and universities, in companies, and even in everyday life. In my opinion, previous work did not meet these criteria.

I believe that my experience in technology research and development is an asset in addressing these issues. This experience required distinguishing between “necessary” and “sufficient” conditions; between hypotheses, correlations, and theories; and between rules and guidelines that are generally valid and those that apply only under certain conditions. These distinctions are important in determining the factors that affect innovative activity. I also believe that being born into a blue-collar environment, being educated in an excellent school system, and attending a major university give me a broad-based perspective from which to view the subject: I grew up around tinkerers, spent my university years around theoreticians, and then worked with inventors and entrepreneurs.

Because I’m an engineer, I have a particular interest in technical innovations, but the innovative spirit affects other aspects of our lives. Societies that consciously encourage innovation in science and technology usually encourage similar creativity in all modes of thought and activity because the associated societal attitudes encourage questioning current practices and improving upon them. In such an environment, people can question the conventional wisdom in politics, religion, and academic subjects.

To gain an understanding of the subject, I found it useful to begin with the innovations of the ancient Egyptians, Mesopotamians, Assyrians, Hebrews, Chinese, Indians, Greeks, and Romans. They developed practical technologies such as stonecutting, sailing, aqueducts, irrigation methods, glassblowing, and metalworking. They developed legal, governmental, and philosophical theories. They developed the roots of modern mathematics and science. The Greeks brought us a whole new way of thinking. The Romans brought us new ways of organizing government. Creative and innovative people have been active for a long time.

For the first few centuries AD, innovative activity occurred primarily in Asia, rather than in Europe and around the Mediterranean. Then Islamic society encouraged curious scholars to harvest the wisdom of the earlier ages, and for about five hundred years, that society produced innovations in medicine, physics, engineering, philosophy, and mathematics. Europe also began to stir. In early medieval times, practical innovations were introduced by people whose names are long forgotten, but whose efforts had significant consequences later. The Catholic Church’s iron grip on philosophical thought eventually loosened, the Protestant Reformation brought competing religious doctrines into being, contact with foreign cultures accelerated, and a fundamental shift in people’s thinking took place. During the Enlightenment, this shift in thinking introduced the concepts that reason was accessible to everyone, that change was not always threatening, and that progress through change was a real possibility. Innovation came to be valued in its own right, something to be embraced rather than feared. With increased trade came mercantilism and the Industrial Revolution. Innovations were recognized as not only intellectually interesting but also economically beneficial. If new inventions could bring prosperity, changes were possible in all walks of life. In this spirit, democracy in America was born. Finally, the last two centuries have brought an explosion of innovation that can only be described as breathtaking. It is a remarkable story.

The word “innovation” has a specific meaning in this book. Webster’s Third New International Dictionary defines innovation as “the introduction of something new” or “something that deviates from established doctrine or practice.” The Oxford English Dictionary defines it as “making changes to something established.” These definitions form a large umbrella—innovations would not be limited to science and technology. Within this broad definition, innovation takes place not only in sciences, medicine, and engineering but also in literature, law, art, philosophy, politics, education, or any subject of endeavor. However, this book focuses on more practical types of innovation; many of the concepts discussed here are not as directly applicable to other creative endeavors like the arts and scholarship. Namely, a device, procedure, concept, theory, or organizational structure is considered to be innovative if it is identifiable as new and is either useful or descriptive of the physical world. This definition refers to ideas and inventions that are novel and that, at least in some small way, change the way a society views the physical world or how it functions.

Devices and inventions are what most people first picture when they hear the word “innovation.” They think of computers, cars, telephones, and other practical machines, but the word also describes less tangible improvements. It can also involve improving a procedure; for example, double-entry bookkeeping was a major advance in commercial activities that enabled businessmen to have a more complete knowledge of their businesses. Concepts of the physical world, while not immediately practical, often involved huge leaps of intellect and imagination to describe the world in new ways. Theories such as that of James Clerk Maxwell connected disparate physical phenomena in novel and useful ways; he showed that radio, infrared, and light waves are essentially the same phenomenon (i.e., electromagnetic radiation) but possessing different frequencies. New organizational structures like limited liability companies have had a huge impact on the economies of the world. These are the types of innovations addressed in this book. Very few innovations coming from tinkerers and individual inventors get widely adopted in their original forms. This is true at every level of sophistication. In Thomas Edison’s time, out of hundreds of patents taken out on recording techniques, only a few withstood the test of time. Like seeds tossed on the top of the ground, only some take root and provide the foundation of major innovations. Some authors claim that the tinkerers’ efforts should not be considered truly innovative, that such a noble term should be reserved for impressive works of the mind. I reject  such a limiting concept, as most inventions were the product of a long chain of incremental improvements involving numerous trials and experiments, as well as the inspiration, intelligence, and perseverance of many smart people.

The concept of innovation as something desirable is a relatively recent phenomenon. Because it questioned the existing dogma, innovation was often considered to be dangerous. Even today, some cultures are uncomfortable with it. To understand why, it is necessary to understand the forces and attitudes in societies that encourage innovation and those that discourage it. For example, many of us would like to believe that tolerance and public education play a critical role, but is this really borne out by events? What about war, peace, and religion? Are there lessons from the past that can be applied in today’s world? I am not a historian, so I have drawn from material written by professional historians and writers. I have no new historical discoveries to share, but I believe my technical training gives me the tools to assess the relative importance of different factors and conditions that have been identified by historians. I believe that the focus on innovation in this book offers a perspective distinctly different from previous accounts.

In particular, I make a distinction between “blue-collar” and “white-collar” innovative activity. This distinction is very useful in describing the different sources of the creative energies at work, right up to about three centuries ago.

Blue-collar innovations refer to tangible inventions, usually produced by working people. Historically, these inventors were typically illiterate and were attempting to make a specific improvement of some sort to meet a known need, or they were tinkerers who experimented to see what would happen if they made changes to existing processes: an ironworker who pounded out a different shape for a plow to make it move more easily through the soil, a bronze producer who experimented with different amounts of tin and copper, a chemist who mixed different substances and observed the properties of the resulting compounds, a glassblower who introduced substances into the melted glass to produce new colors. These people were what I call blue-collar innovators. They were usually born into the lower classes, and they performed the practical tasks of the societies. Their innovations were usually passed down through pictures and oral means from one generation to the next.

White-collar innovations refer to less tangible inventions, such as mathematical techniques, useful procedures, and observations of patterns in nature: the mathematicians who recognized the usefulness of the Pythagorean theorem in construction, the scientist who deduced that meteorites fall to the earth from space, the scientists who modeled the solar system as a sun with planets orbiting around it. These were what I call white-collar innovative activities. They were typically conducted by  people born into the privileged classes, who served in the courts of the emperors as advisers, scribes, and priests. They usually disdained the blue-collar innovative activities and the people who took part in them. Their innovations were often passed down from one generation to the next using the written word, as well as through mentoring and training. There was some crossover between the two types of innovation: since members of the privileged classes were in charge of managing the economies, some of them learned about blue-collar techniques and methods and incorporated them into the written societal knowledge base.

Once literacy became widespread, many more blue-collar innovators had access to information and training. This meant that more complex information could be passed on via the written word and diagrams, and blue-collar ideas morphed into technology. At the same time, white-collar innovators began to value experiments and observations as much as abstract thinking and began to get their hands dirty, and science as it is known today was born. Once both kinds of innovative activity were exploring the same natural universe, it was only a matter of time until the worlds met.

During the explosion of innovation of the last few hundred years, many inventions involved a combination of scientific concepts and technological knowledge. The quest to harness steam to drain water from mines and to move large objects culminated in the invention of the steam engine, after a century of efforts that combined the two kinds of knowledge. It was one of the earliest and most powerful examples of the marriage of science and technology.

Scientific advances in atomic and molecular theory have brought us knowledge of the atomic structure of materials, which have enabled us to understand chemistry and the structure of materials at a significantly deeper level. For example, semiconductors have quantum mechanical properties that make the transistor possible. Diodes, triodes, and amplifiers were transistorized, and further innovations reduced the size of these circuits to unbelievably small sizes so that today millions of these are routinely etched onto silicon wafers a few millimeters wide. To achieve this required a huge amount of theoretical and practical  technological knowledge that grew rapidly and involved innovation in optics, etching techniques, air-cleaning techniques, materials, and many other fields.

There are still examples today of pure blue-collar innovative activities, as can be seen in magazines such as Popular Mechanics. Other examples can be seen at art fairs, where some artists seek out new materials to work with. I still come across novel designs for bread knives and new hand tools. One can find these and many other clever things on the internet. White-collar innovation continues unabated in mathematics and the sciences, and now new ideas come from all over the world, reflecting the surges in literacy and access to education in developing countries. The public fascination for new things has increased general respect for creativity of all kinds.

Another different perspective that I bring to the table is the importance I attach to the form of government in a society—in particular, the extent to which power is concentrated in the hands of a few. While innovation occurred in autocracies, it was severely circumscribed. I will also show that it only rarely occurred for the benefit of the populace; the people in power discouraged such activity. I will also show that some types of innovation have a democratizing effect (i.e., that they empower ordinary people).

When I began researching this subject, I thought I might find that innovations historically set the stage for cultural and political change, but I found that I couldn’t make a very convincing case. In fact, the opposite appears to be true—namely, political and cultural changes initially set the stage for the rapid growth in innovative activity. Once that happened, however, certain key inventions and essential types of innovations did indeed spur the development of democratic institutions, which in turn encouraged innovation, creating a virtuous circle. In this book I will describe in some detail how this came about.

Reviewing historical material has given me a renewed appreciation for how difficult it is to be truly objective, and perhaps it is ultimately impossible. I can see that even the best historians, attempting to be as objective and intellectually honest as they can, have biases that show through their work, biases that become more obvious as time passes. There are also a number of historians with stated agendas, who assert, usually with good reason, that previous writers have ignored or even denied the contributions of minorities, women, lower-class people, or specific cultures, and they focus on those contributions to try to help balance the historical record. It seems especially difficult for anyone to assess the contributions of different cultures because there is a strong urge within all of us to consider our own culture to be the best. For example, Islamic philosophers and scientists have been characterized on the one hand by European scholars as merely parroting earlier thinkers or only preserving knowledge that would later be utilized; on the other hand, they have been described as brilliant scholars and thinkers in their own right who made significant original contributions. As another example, some scholars have derided inventors among working people as “low mechanicks,” and their discoveries and innovations have been dismissed as lucky accidents. Biases are clearly at work.

It’s not just our natural arrogance that we need to confront. We must also confront our tendency to think of our own situation as more typical than it really is in other parts of the world and than it really was in history. We have to recognize that people did think of their world differently than we do today. While our brains are constructed similarly at birth, our experiences significantly affect our opinions, our assumptions, and even the way we think. Our everyday vocabulary is different—for example, the words “science,” “technology,” “innovation,” and “creativity,” as we think of them today, did not exist in any language until recently. To inquire about the attitude of a pharaoh toward innovative activity would have been meaningless. Studies and observations of nature were considered philosophical, not scientific. People didn’t appreciate the difference between speed and acceleration, and it took a long time before the concept of instantaneous motion was understood. Today we take it for granted that we can travel comfortably in a car or airplane at high speeds and say that we were going at sixty or six hundred miles per hour at some point in time. We also understand that we get pushed into the seat only when we accelerate in a car or take off in an airplane and pulled away from it when we brake or slow down. As difficult as it is, we need to attempt to see the world from the points of view of the people of earlier times.

We’ve all heard the saying that necessity is the mother of invention, but it would be more accurate to say that necessity is the father of invention. It is the father who traditionally tends to the needs of the family, and who is more likely to look for ways to improve his ability to provide them. At the societal level this translates into agricultural, construction, and military inventions, where the needs of food, shelter and security dominate. On the other hand the mother of invention is desire—the desire to add beauty and variety to life to make it more enjoyable. It is the mother who finds new ways of preparing food and adding spices and sauces to make it more interesting, and who finds ways of making clothing more attractive, with different colors, weaves, jewelry, and designs. It is the feminine side of us that wants to make our buildings, homes, furniture, and landscapes more beautiful and varied, and wants to bring music, art, celebration, entertainment and joy into our lives. When the masculine side has dominated societies, the innovations have been oriented to needs, and have discouraged maternal innovations, resulting in grim, humorless governments. Fascistic and communistic societies come to mind here, with their military uniforms and Mao jackets, unimaginative buildings, and formalized military displays. When the mother of invention is allowed to provide things that people want, the societies become vibrant, people constantly expand the scope of what they want, and the economies thrive. Today product innovation is driven much more by wants than needs. We want smartphones, computer tablets, large TV screens, and good sound systems. We want to travel and spend our weekends and vacations having fun. While our basic needs could be met simply and inexpensively, we spend much of our income to make our food, automobiles, houses, and furniture fancy, convenient, and attractive. All these require continuous improvements and innovations. Mother drives our successful economies, not father.

We know that inventions and innovations are not always good for humanity. Innovative skills can be used for evil and antisocial purposes, and the development of highly destructive weapons has raised serious moral issues. Another example, the possibility of cloning human beings, also raises moral issues: just because we can develop something doesn’t mean we should. Having said this, however, innovation is, on balance, a positive endeavor; it is the most important engine there is for economic progress, and it is essential for improving our lives. Chapters 1–6 in this book provide a brief history of innovative activity and describe the political and geographic environments. Chapters 7–14 analyze the societal conditions that encouraged innovations, and these are synthesized into a compact set of the essential conditions that support innovative activity. The final chapters provide a look at some great innovators and explore how different kinds of societies do or do not provide these essential conditions.