• Demonstrates how innovation is used to create wealth, productivity growth, and improved quality of life
• Considers future disruptive technologies such as AI, discussing their implications for work and employment
• Looks at the process of innovation, the ways organizations use their resources to innovate, and the eventual outcomes of innovation
• Explores innovation emerging from and for use in developing countries, such as digital money
• Considers how we consume the products of innovation
• Explains why failure in innovation is so common but at the same time so necessary
• Examines how the innovation process is stimulated by new technologies such as the internet

 
What is innovation? How is innovation used in business? How can we use it to succeed? 

Innovation, the ways ideas are made valuable, plays an essential role in economic and social development, and is an increasingly topical issue. Over the last 150 years our world has hit an accelerated rate of transformation. From aeroplanes to television and penicillin, and from radios to frozen food and digital money, the fruits of innovation surround us. 

This Very Short Introduction looks at what innovation is and why it affects us so profoundly. It examines how it occurs, who stimulates it, how it is pursued, and what its outcomes are, both positive and negative. Considering innovation today, and discussing future disruptive technologies such as AI, which have important implications for work and employment, Mark Dodgson and David Gann consider the extent to which our understanding of innovation has developed over the past century and how it might be used to interpret the global economy.