The next industrial revolution

David Mindell is an eminent American academic and entrepreneur, and in The New Lunar Society he draws on the group of (mostly) men who forged the industrial revolution in 18th century Britain to try to write about the next industrial revolution in the 21st. (Photo: Andrew Curry. CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) The Lunar Society, celebrated in Jenny Uglow’s fine book about them, included most of the leading industrialists in Britain at the time. They met on the full moon, because it was safer to get home when it was lighter. The relationship between Matthew Boulton and James Watt is at the heart of the narrative, and you can see why. Watt gets most of the credit for the invention that transformed Trescothick’s engine, but he probably deserves less of it. Because Watt’s improvements were product innovation, but Boulton turned this into processinnovation. Boulton created a production system to scale up Watt’s invention. Process innovation Mindell argues that the US has focussed too much on product…