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OverviewWhat does it take for a society to be able to innovate? The question is crucial today when an increasing share of world patents are taken out by countries such as Japan, South Korea and China, which have limited energy resources and cultures very different from those in the West. However, most previous studies of the beginnings of industrialization have focused on the resources and institutions of Britain alone. As a result, they have missed the lessons to be learned from casting the net more widely so as to examine all regions of the North-Atlantic community. This book pinpoints the surprising differences between innovating and non-innovating regions. Protection of property rights, a practical ideology and abundant resources were not sufficient to spark accelerated innovation.The key to the Industrial Revolution, this study shows through case studies and rigorous verification, was the effect of expanding social networks on people's willingness to cooperate. Language standardization permitted the widening of circles of cooperation to encompass individuals with increasingly different sets of knowledge. The result was an unprecedented burst of what some linguists have called double-scope blending - the integration of hitherto unrelated concepts to create something new. These findings have important implications for corporate and government policy. Full Product DetailsAuthor: Leonard DudleyPublisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing Imprint: Cambridge Scholars Publishing Edition: Unabridged edition Dimensions: Width: 14.80cm , Height: 2.60cm , Length: 21.20cm Weight: 0.549kg ISBN: 9781443840965ISBN 10: 1443840963 Pages: 295 Publication Date: 12 October 2012 Audience: College/higher education , Professional and scholarly , Postgraduate, Research & Scholarly , Professional & Vocational Format: Hardback Publisher's Status: Active Availability: In Print  This item will be ordered in for you from one of our suppliers. Upon receipt, we will promptly dispatch it out to you. For in store availability, please contact us. Table of ContentsReviewsWhy did the Industrial Revolution begin in eighteenth-century England? Which factors or policies promote societal innovation? In Mothers of Innovation, Dudley unravels these far-reaching questions in a fittingly bold and interdisciplinary manner [...]. His conclusions emphasize the connection between innovation, collaboration, and social networks, with both historical and present-day implications. Dudley's means are as important as his ends; he offers readers a confident, compelling illustration of the value of multidisciplinary analysis. - Robert Martello, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 44:3 (Winter 2014), 385-386. Leonard Dudley answers his own sharp questions about 'where' and 'when' in terms of cooperative networks, language standardization, the availability of resources, the absence of borough restrictions, the protection of property rights, and local path dependence. His is an engaging and challenging book that deserves to spark plenty of further research among the open minded. - Eric Jones, www.eh.net/BookReview/reviews/ In Mothers of Innovation, Leonard Dudley brings communication, networks and interaction to the study of innovation. It rings true. The Michael Porter study of high concentrations of successful competitors in a wide range of industries comes to mind. As one who has lived for many years in Silicon Valley, a modern center of innovation, I find that there are also echoes from the past: a delicate balance between cooperation and competition, multiple disciplines producing cognitive dissonance leading to innovation, and the prevalence of the human analog of a distributed network. The book does a masterful job of laying out the structural underpinnings of highly productive innovation environments, and uses a wealth of historical examples from the period 1700 to 1850, to establish that communication, education, common languages and interaction are key ingredients in technological advancement, past and present. - Michael Spence, co-recipient of the 2001 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics New theory and evidence on an old topic! Dudley considers and classifies over 100 innovations and locates them in individual cities rather than merely in nations. This permits him to consider important new evidence that concerns both existing demand and supply side theories of the causes of the innovations that constituted the Industrial Revolution and also the influence of the author's important new theories of the significance of social networking. - Richard Lipsey, co-author of Economic Transformations: General Purpose Technologies and Long Term Economic Growth This book is a fair-minded and judicious attempt to deal with the Industrial Revolution in a new way. Professor Dudley asks a well-known question: why was there a rapid acceleration in the rate of innovation from 1750 to 1850? But his approach is quite novel; rather than focusing on economic changes within nation-states, he investigates the extent of cooperation and communication technologies within towns and their surrounding regions. The research is thorough. Using a sample of 117 innovations across 201 regions in England and northern France, Dudley argues that it was the standardization of the English and French languages, and the attendant rise in literacy, that made the cooperation and the innovations possible. This is a serious scholarly study. - Ricardo Duchesne, author of The Uniqueness of Western Civilization Why did the Industrial Revolution begin in eighteenth-century England? Which factors or policies promote societal innovation? In Mothers of Innovation, Dudley unravels these far-reaching questions in a fittingly bold and interdisciplinary manner [...]. His conclusions emphasize the connection between innovation, collaboration, and social networks, with both historical and present-day implications. Dudley's means are as important as his ends; he offers readers a confident, compelling illustration of the value of multidisciplinary analysis. - Robert Martello, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 44:3 (Winter 2014), 385-386. Leonard Dudley answers his own sharp questions about `where' and `when' in terms of cooperative networks, language standardization, the availability of resources, the absence of borough restrictions, the protection of property rights, and local path dependence. His is an engaging and challenging book that deserves to spark plenty of further research among the open minded. - Eric Jones, www.eh.net/BookReview/reviews/ In Mothers of Innovation, Leonard Dudley brings communication, networks and interaction to the study of innovation. It rings true. The Michael Porter study of high concentrations of successful competitors in a wide range of industries comes to mind. As one who has lived for many years in Silicon Valley, a modern center of innovation, I find that there are also echoes from the past: a delicate balance between cooperation and competition, multiple disciplines producing cognitive dissonance leading to innovation, and the prevalence of the human analog of a distributed network. The book does a masterful job of laying out the structural underpinnings of highly productive innovation environments, and uses a wealth of historical examples from the period 1700 to 1850, to establish that communication, education, common languages and interaction are key ingredients in technological advancement, past and present. - Michael Spence, co-recipient of the 2001 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics New theory and evidence on an old topic! Dudley considers and classifies over 100 innovations and locates them in individual cities rather than merely in nations. This permits him to consider important new evidence that concerns both existing demand and supply side theories of the causes of the innovations that constituted the Industrial Revolution and also the influence of the author's important new theories of the significance of social networking. - Richard Lipsey, co-author of Economic Transformations: General Purpose Technologies and Long Term Economic Growth This book is a fair-minded and judicious attempt to deal with the Industrial Revolution in a new way. Professor Dudley asks a well-known question: why was there a rapid acceleration in the rate of innovation from 1750 to 1850? But his approach is quite novel; rather than focusing on economic changes within nation-states, he investigates the extent of cooperation and communication technologies within towns and their surrounding regions. The research is thorough. Using a sample of 117 innovations across 201 regions in England and northern France, Dudley argues that it was the standardization of the English and French languages, and the attendant rise in literacy, that made the cooperation and the innovations possible. This is a serious scholarly study. - Ricardo Duchesne, author of The Uniqueness of Western Civilization Author InformationLeonard Dudley, born in Vancouver, Canada, received his PhD in Economics from Yale University. Currently, he is Honorary Professor at the Universite de Montreal. He is the author of The Word and the Sword: How Techniques of Information and Violence Have Shaped Our World (1991) and Information Revolutions in the History of the West (2008). Tab Content 6Author Website:Countries AvailableAll regions |
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