The Invisible Engine

Eugene A. Fitzgerald, the Merton C. Flemings SMA Professor in MIT’s Department of Materials Science and Engineering, explores how innovation happens and why it so often resists attempts to control it in his new book, “The Invisible Engine: Why Innovation Evades Control.”

About the book

For more than a century, an exponential curve has risen with remarkable consistency: computing power per dollar doubling, redoubling, generation after generation. No single person, company, or government was in charge. No one wrote the plan. And yet progress arrived, almost on schedule, through wars, depressions, and the rise and fall of empires. How?

In “The Invisible Engine,” Fitzgerald examines the forces behind this progress and the innovation process itself. Drawing on three decades of research, a decade-long experiment in Singapore, and his own role in the development of strained silicon, Fitzgerald presents a practical framework for understanding why innovation works and why institutions often struggle to foster it.