Invention and Innovation
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Invention and Innovation
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Invention and Innovation by Vaclav Smil
From the New York Times-bestselling author, a new volume on the history of human ingenuity—and its attendant breakthroughs and busts. Included in BILL GATES's 2023 Holiday Reading List Included in Lit Hub’s Most Anticipated Books of 2023 Included in The Next Big Idea Club’s February 2023 Must-Read Books "Every Smil book that I own is marked up with lots of notes that I take while reading. Invention and Innovation is no exception. Even when I disagree with him, I learn a lot from him...he always strengthens my thinking." —Bill Gates, Gates Notes The world is never finished catching up with Vaclav Smil. In his latest and perhaps most readable book, Invention and Innovation, the prolific author—a favorite of Bill Gates—pens an insightful and fact-filled jaunt through the history of human invention. Impatient with the hype that so often accompanies innovation, Smil offers in this book a clear-eyed corrective to the overpromises that accompany everything from new cures for diseases to AI. He reminds us that even after we go quite far along the invention-development-application trajectory, we may never get anything real to deploy. Or worse, even after we have succeeded by introducing an invention, its future may be marked by underperformance, disappointment, demise, or outright harm. Drawing on his vast breadth of scientific and historical knowledge, Smil explains the difference between invention and innovation, and looks not only at inventions that failed to dominate as promised (such as the airship, nuclear fission, and supersonic flight), but also at those that turned disastrous (leaded gasoline, DDT, and chlorofluorocarbons). And finally, most importantly, he offers a “wish list” of inventions that we most urgently need to confront the staggering challenges of the twenty-first century. Filled with engaging examples and pragmatic approaches, this book is a sobering account of the folly that so often attends human ingenuity—and how we can, and must, better align our expectations with reality.He has published 35 books and more than 400 papers on these topics. His research areas span throughout the sciences. He is a Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the University of Manitoba, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada (Science Academy), and a Member of the Order of Canada. In 2010 he was listed by Foreign Policy among the top 100 global thinkers. He was the first non-American to receive the American Association for the Advancement of Science Award for Public Understanding of Science and Technology.
He has worked as a consultant for many US, EU and international institutions, has been an invited speaker in nearly 400 conferences and workshops in the USA, Canada, Europe, Asia and Africa, and has lectured at many universities in North America, Europe and East Asia. Lastly, in 2013 he had the distinction having Bill Gates state that There is no author whose books I look forward to more than Vaclav Smil in an article that appeared in Wired.com.
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9780262048057 |
| ISBN 10 | 0262048051 |
| Title | Invention and Innovation |
| Author | Vaclav Smil |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Hardback |
| Publisher | MIT Press Ltd |
| Year published | 2023-02-14 |
| Number of pages | 208 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |