In a Wall Street Journal article last month, author Matt Ridley argued that ” Innovation Can’t Be Forced, but It Can Be Quashed “.

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After noting that innovation has been slower in hardware than in software, the article argues that this is mainly because “bits are lightly regulated and atoms are heavily regulated.” But is over-regulation the root cause of the slow pace of innovation in hardware? Or is it the way hardware is being managed in these big old manufacturing firms?

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Ridley’s new book, How Innovation Works (HarperCollins, 2020) unwittingly points to a potent cause of the problem: inattention to the primary principle of business agility—an obsession with the customer’s needs. In 406 pages of describing how innovation works, Ridley’s book mentions the customer only ten times, […]

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