Who Built That

Many books on innovation fix their gaze on Silicon Valley, laboratories, and financing myths. The value of Who Built That lies in turning the lens on “trivial” things—flashlights, toilet paper, bottle caps, razors—which are precisely the inventions ordinary people use every day. Malkin, a veteran columnist, is a skilled storyteller: how a chance acquaintance becomes a multibillion-dollar business, how a bridge consumes a family’s entire life, how one failure forces the next success—all read with the tension of a novel. More noteworthy are the questions she returns to again and again: Is profit the enemy of innovation? What does patent protection mean for grassroots inventors? What role do family, faith, and attachment to home play in entrepreneurship? These questions remain relevant in today’s entrepreneurial context. The Chinese edition, translated by Huang Xiaoli, is plain and fluent, organized in four parts that build progressively from everyday objects to the next generation of industry, closing with the intelligent prosthetic limb, shifting the vision from nostalgia to the future. Suitable for readers who want a different angle on where innovation comes from.