The Innovation Delusion

How Our Obsession with the New Has Disrupted the Work That Matters Most

By: Lee Vinsel, Andrew L. Russell

Narrated by: Rob Shapiro

“Innovation” is the hottest buzzword in business. But what if our obsession with finding the next big thing has distracted us from the work that matters most?

“The most important book I’ve read in a long time . . . It explains so much about what is wrong with our technology, our economy, and the world, and gives a simple recipe for how to fix it: Focus on understanding what it takes for your products and services to last.”—Tim O’Reilly, founder of O’Reilly Media

It’s hard to avoid innovation these days. Nearly every product gets marketed as being disruptive, whether it’s genuinely a new invention or just a new toothbrush. But in this manifesto on thestate of American work, historians of technology Lee Vinsel and Andrew L. Russell argue that our way of thinking about and pursuing innovation has made us poorer, less safe, and—ironically—less innovative.

Drawing on years of original research and reporting, The Innovation Delusion shows how the ideology of change for its own sake has proved a disaster. Corporations have spent millions hiring chief innovation officers while their core businesses tank. Computer science programs have drilled their students on programming and design, even though theoverwhelming majority of jobs are in IT and maintenance. In countless cities, suburban sprawl has left local governments with loads of deferred repairs that they can’t afford to fix. And sometimes innovation even kills—like in 2018 when a Miami bridge hailed for its innovative design collapsed onto a highway and killed six people.

In this provocative, deeply researched book, Vinsel and Russell tell the story of how we devalued the work that underpins modern life—and, in doing so, wrecked our economy and public infrastructure while lining the pockets of consultants who combine the ego of Silicon Valley with the worst of Wall Street’s greed. The authors offer a compelling plan for how we can shift our focus away from the pursuit of growth at all costs, and back toward neglected activities like maintenance, care, and upkeep.

For anyone concerned by the crumbling state of our roads and bridges or the direction our economy is headed, The Innovation Delusion is a deeply necessary reevaluation of a trend we can still disrupt.

A great book and different take to innovation

Lee and Andrew are fantastic storytellers who detail out the cultural shift that has happened over the past few years in Silicon Valley and what WE can do to create a better path forward

Innovation Speak vs. Actual Innovation

Love the exposition of the reality that the more you create/have; the more you have to maintain

Absolutely remarkable. A must read!

I flew through this book in a few days and was captivated the entire time. It covers a wide range of examples and topics but two key takeaways resonate with me now that I’ve finished the book: 1) a maintenance mindset is the key for a healthy personal life and living in a healthy community — we must maintain our lives and our spaces to thrive! 2) innovation is a key example of focusing on the wrong thing when it actually only serves as a bandaid for deeper, systemic issues. By focusing on the flashy and disruptive approach, we continue to value the wrong things, typically putting the most disadvantaged in further jeopardy. You must read this book!

Good ideas, but one-sided and lacking insights

Good ideas with good support, mostly about maintenance of civil and social infrastructure, but lacking necessary counterarguments to make it useful in a real discussion. The focus of this audible is too narrow and one-sided to be of much interest. Too academic, but yet not rigorously academic enough. Too much opinion-based fluff.