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Invention and Innovation - A Brief History of Hype and Failure (Paperback)
Loot Price: R319
Discovery Miles 3 190
You Save: R116
(27%)
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Invention and Innovation - A Brief History of Hype and Failure (Paperback)
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List price R435
Loot Price R319
Discovery Miles 3 190
You Save R116 (27%)
To be released on 18 November 2024. You can pre-order this product. We should be able to ship between Monday, 25 Nov 2024 and Monday, 2 Dec 2024.
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Donate to Against Period Poverty
Total price: R339
Discovery Miles: 3 390
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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.
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