FMI Public Speaker Series at ASU - Matt Ridley

2601 West Avenue N,San Angelo TX 76904

03 November, 2021

Description

Best-selling author Matt Ridley presents 'How Innovation Works: And Why It Flourishes in Freedom.' Free Market Institute Speaker Series – November 3 How Innovation Works: And Why It Flourishes in FreedomThe Free Market Institute (FMI) at Angelo State University welcomes Matt Ridley, best-selling author and member of the Science and Technology Select Committee for the UK House of Lords, to present an FMI Public Speaker Series lecture based on his recent book, How Innovation Works: And Why It Flourishes in Freedom (May 2021). The lecture will take place on Wednesday, November 3, 2021, from 5:30 – 6:30 PM, in the Mayer Administration Building - Auditorium (2601 W. Ave. N, San Angelo, TX 76909), on the Angelo State University campus. Dr. Ridley will also be available for a book-signing at 4:45 PM prior to the public lecture. His book, How Innovation Works: And Why It Flourishes in Freedom, will be available for purchase beginning at 4:30 PM. This event is free and open to the Angelo State University community and the general public. ASU students attending for extra credit are encouraged to arrive early for check-in. About the ProgramInnovation is the main event of the modern age, the reason we experience both dramatic improvements in our living standards and unsettling changes in our society. Forget short-term symptoms like Donald Trump and Brexit, it is innovation that will shape the twenty-first century. Yet innovation remains a mysterious process, poorly understood by policy makers and businessmen alike. Dr. Ridley argues that we need to see innovation as an incremental, bottom-up, fortuitous process that happens as a direct result of the human habit of exchange, rather than an orderly, top-down process developing according to a plan. Innovation is crucially different from invention, because it is the turning of inventions into things of practical and affordable use to people. Innovation speeds up in some sectors and slows down in others. It is always a collective, collaborative phenomenon, involving trial and error, not a matter of lonely genius. It happens mainly in just a few parts of the world at any one time. It still cannot be modeled properly by economists, but it can easily be discouraged by politicians. Far from there being too much innovation, we may be on the brink of an innovation famine. Join us for this event as Dr. Ridley derives these and other lessons from the lively stories of scores of innovations based on his recently published book, How Innovation Works: And Why It Flourishes in Freedom (May 2021). For more information about this and other upcoming events, visit www.events.fmi.ttu.edu or contact the Free Market Institute at [email protected] or 806.742.7138.