Matthew Wisnioski’s Every American an Innovator: How Innovation Became a Way of Life is a recent contribution to the reliably interesting Smithsonian Institution’s Lemelson Center Studies in Invention and Innovation. Contrary to its subtitle, this is not a history of how innovation became ubiquitous in the US. Rather, this is a history of how, in the decades after World War II, US academics and policymakers began assigning the label “innovation” to new technologies and new ways of doing things, how they actively tried to promote innovation through public policy and in public-facing institutions, and how this was ultimately reflected in a popular “innovation culture.”

After an introductory chapter in which he describes the goals of the book, in chapter 2 Wisnioski describes the emergence of innovation as a field of study, focusing especially on early work by sociologists in the 1950s, with particular emphasis on Everett Rogers’s foundational research. Chapter 3 describes federal efforts to create an innovation culture, highlighting innovation prize programs created by the Nixon administration. Chapter 4 tracks the spread of the innovation culture through the business elite starting in the 1960s, including the creation of innovation-specific magazines and other publications. Chapter 5 returns to the ivory tower, describing the emergence of innovation and entrepreneurship incubators in higher education. Chapter 6 describes changes in the composition of the labor force and economic geography as the innovation culture spread. Chapter 7 focuses on efforts to make innovation inclusive. Chapter 8 describes innovation programs in primary and secondary schools. Chapter 9 describes a growing backlash against innovation; Wisnoski concludes that “[t]he imperative to make every American into an innovator reached its apogee in the 2010s” (p. 234). A final chapter summarizes the argument and questions the future of a “world built in innovation’s name” (p. 238).

In telling this story, Wisnioski describes an array of initiatives, programs, and policies designed to promote innovation—a dizzying array, in fact. For example, a single page (p. 184) describes, by my count, six different programs to encourage young people to become innovators. While the entire book is not quite this dense, many passages read as a whirlwind tour of initiatives to encourage innovation. Ultimately, however, this is a minor quibble, and this kaleidoscopic treatment is also one of the book’s strengths. An applied microeconomist could easily build a successful career conducting program evaluations of the various projects described in this book. And while Wisnioski covers many different topics, the book is clear and well written, with each chapter devoted to a single topic and able to stand alone. My main concerns lie not with the presentation of facts but with Wisnioski’s interpretation of them.

First, it is easy to come away from the book with the impression that America’s innovation culture was imposed from the top down, progressing from basic research in the 1950s to federal government initiatives in the 1970s, eventually trickling down through higher education to reach younger children and marginalized communities during the 1980s and 1990s. This is in part due to the fact that chapters are organized by topic rather than chronologically. But Wisnioski explicitly encourages this interpretation as well. He writes, for instance, that “‘innovation’ is in practice and concept a creation of the federal government” (p. 48), with federal bureaucrats acting as “innovation evangelists” who “translated innovation into a national vision” (p. 49). A closer inspection of the timing of events calls this interpretation into question. Popular innovation magazines like International Science and Technology (discussed on pp. 79–82) entered into the culture more than a decade before presidential innovation prizes, and precursors to university technology transfer programs (pp. 104–118) and private initiatives like IBM’s Odyssey of the Mind (p. 184) launched concurrently with the earliest federal government programs Wisnioski describes. One wonders whether Wisnioski has the direction of causality reversed, with federal programs following the growing cultural popularity of innovation and entrepreneurship rather than leading the way.

Second, early in his work Wisnioski claims that innovation “barely registered as a cultural touchstone” (p. xii) prior to the second half of the twentieth century. My reading of American economic history is at odds with this claim. For example, B. Zorina Khan shows that in the early republic, patenting activity in the US was remarkably democratic by world standards (e.g., Khan Reference Khan2005; Sokoloff and Khan Reference Sokoloff and Khan1990). So while perhaps not every American was an innovator, more Americans were innovators than any other people anywhere else in the world. Khan (Reference Khan2020) shows that private societies and organizations like the Franklin Institute frequently attempted to encourage innovation through prizes, publicity, and other means. And the diffusion of new ideas was also encouraged, for instance through world and local fairs (e.g., Khan Reference Khan2013; Moser Reference Moser2012; Rydell Reference Rydell1993). Famous innovators like Thomas Edison (Wachhorst Reference Wachhorst1983) and Henry Ford (Lewis Reference Lewis1976) were viewed as folk heroes, worthy of emulation. This does not seem like a culture in which innovation “barely registered.”

What did undoubtedly change in the decades after World War II was that innovation became an explicit focus in higher education and public policy, which Wisnioski documents well. But one wonders whether this reflected a change in attitudes toward innovation or simply the expanding scope and breadth of these institutions. Universities added numerous new programs after World War II (including gender, ethnic, and cultural studies; computer science; etc.), so the postwar rise is hardly unique to studies of innovation (e.g., Geiger Reference Geiger1993). The postwar years were likewise a period in which the federal government famously expanded the scope of activities it funded; this again does not seem unique to innovation.

To be clear, none of the above is meant to suggest that Wisnioski is ignorant of either the history of innovation prior to World War II or the broader changes in education and public policy after the war. But I do question whether the postwar innovation culture he describes was in fact a sharp break from the preceding decades.

Reading this book as an economist, I found myself struggling to square Wisnioski’s compelling cultural history with what we know about the US’s actual innovative performance during the late twentieth century. While innovation was increasingly celebrated in the popular culture, the rate of productivity growth was slowing (Byrne et al. Reference Byrne, Fernald and Reinsdorf2016; Gordon Reference Gordon2016). Since the 1970s, new inventions have become less novel and impactful (Arts et al. Reference Arts, Hou and Gomez2021; Kalyani Reference Kalyani2026). Since at least the 1990s, inventive activity has become concentrated in fewer locations (Andrews and Whalley Reference Andrews and Whalley2022) and comes from fewer and larger firms (Akcigit and Ates Reference Akcigit and Ates2023; Choi et al. Reference Choi, Braguinsky, Ding, Jo and Kim2025). Despite the spread of entrepreneurial training programs and a culture that uplifts the entrepreneur, business dynamism has declined since the 1970s as well (Decker et al. Reference Decker, Haltiwanger, Jarmin and Miranda2014). Efforts to make innovation more inclusive have not been particularly successful, either: Marginalized groups are severely underrepresented among inventors (Bell et al. Reference Bell, Chetty, Jaravel, Petkova and Van Reenen2019), and racial and gender gaps in invention are closing only very slowly over time (Sarada et al. Reference Sarada and Ziebarth2019).

These economic trends are not the focus of Wisnioski’s book. The productivity slowdown—arguably the most important macroeconomic trend of the last half century—is mentioned only once in passing, part of a discussion of other backlashes to the rise of innovation culture (p. 217). In his penultimate chapter, Wisnioski depicts innovation culture as a victim of its own success; given actual innovation performance during this time period, it might be more accurate to describe it as a victim of its own failure. To put it bluntly, what happened to all of the innovations promised by this innovation culture? How did we have an innovation culture and an innovation slowdown at the same time?Footnote ¹

Wisnioski’s book shows that the United States became exceptionally good at talking about innovation, teaching innovation, and rewarding activities that looked like innovation. It is less clear whether this translated into doing more innovation. There is a divide between how we talk about innovation in the culture and actual innovation outcomes. Understanding this divide is a central unresolved question in the study of innovation. There also appears to be a divide between how economists talk about innovation and how it is discussed by historians and other social scientists. Bridging this latter divide would likely go a long way to understanding the former.