This is to the Cato Daily Podcast for Saturday, May 23rd, 2020.

I'm Caleb Brown. Innovation and invention aren't quite the same thing.

To innovate is to make better, to reform something to better suit human

purposes or to reduce costs so that products can more easily pass a market test. In his new book,

how innovation works, Matt Ridley gives us many historical examples of how

innovation has occurred and offers some lessons for how best to keep innovation going.

We spoke this week.

Years ago, I read a book, I think it was called Hardball, and it details several cases where

corporate America faced a problem, and one that stood out to me was Frito Lay versus Eagle Snacks.

I think those were the two companies involved.

And Frito Lay discovered that people preferred Eagle Snacks to Frito-Lay products?

And they said, well, what if we tell them it's Frito-Lay?

And they said, okay, so they do that test,

and they find out that people strongly preferred

Eagle Snacks to Frido Lay products.

And so companies are in many cases just constantly put in this situation

where they have to battle to come up with, in this case, a gold standard potato chip.

But more broadly with respect to innovation, your book, how does it work?

Well, I talk about innovation as a process that's not the same as invention. So in other words, I'm more interested in how you turn a prototype into something that's affordable and available and reliable than the sort of very first

prototype of something. That's important too, you know, coming up with the first new idea, but it's surprising how often people have neglected that and talked about the inventors but not the innovators.

The people like Thomas Edison who turned, you know, the basic idea of the light bulb into something that really could be relied upon and would work for a good long time.

And he tried 5,000 different types of plant material before he settled on Japanese bamboo for the

...