It’s been almost a century since Schumpeter introduced the concept of innovation in a business context in his 1911 book The Theory of Economic Development.

Then innovation was regarded as a disturbance in the flow of industrial and commercial life resulting from new product and service combinations created by entrepreneurs. Today the role of innovation in capitalist economies is well established.

Baumol says that capitalism’s great achievement is to make innovation, which he defines as the fuel of the capitalist machine, routine.