The importance of innovation in driving economic growth and better societal outcomes is often overlooked, but not here - this book brings Schumpeterian theory back into its rightful place as a critical economic process. Reviewing a wide range of economic research on the correlates and causes of positive outcomes, the authors show that innovation is often at the root of them all. Further, they demonstrate that when governments target phenomena that hamper innovation, they tend to get better results.

This book does have an Achilles heel, however - it's far too bought into long-discredited notions of Western exceptionalism and the primacy of Western-style institutions of causing economic success. The work of Pistor and others has since taken these notions out to the woodshed, and perhaps unsurprisingly these are the book sections notably free of citations. If you skip those sections it's an excellent book on an important topic