From the lightbulb to the iPhone, technological innovation is largely responsible for the revolutionary increases in mankind’s standard of living over the last several centuries. But innovation itself is still largely misunderstood, often imagined in the public consciousness as the doing of a sole scientist in a laboratory somewhere having a “eureka” moment and stumbling onto a discovery. In his new book, How Innovation Works: And Why It Flourishes In Freedom, British journalist Matt Ridley attempts to reshape the way we think about innovation, describing how societies can encourage it — and how they often do the opposite.

Ridley lays out a unique vision of innovation based on what he calls the “Infinite Improbability Drive,” the notion that there are infinite combinations of atoms, widgets, and ideas. In his telling, innovation is simply the “process of constantly discovering ways of rearranging the world into forms that are unlikely to arise by chance — and that happen to be useful.” Invention, then, is not the same thing as innovation. For an idea to be truly innovative, it must be scalable and capable of catching on.