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In a time of slowed innovation and technological pessimism in our popular culture, and when a viral threat means we need more innovations in quicker time than ever before, it's crucial we understand the mindset that gave birth to the first age of invention that transformed our world.

Dr Madsen Pirie is joined by Anton Howes as they explore the mentality of inventors and innovators. Not a technique, skill, or special understanding but a frame of mind: innovators seeing room for improvement where others see none. Together they will explain how this mentality can be received by anyone, and it can be applied to any field – anything, after all, can be better.

Anton's first book Arts and Minds: How the Royal Society of Arts Changed a Nation, is out now from Princeton University Press. It tells the story of the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures, and Commerce - essentially, Britain's national improvement agency, in any and every way imaginable. In it, he reveals a hidden history of three centuries of social reform, from eighteenth-century coffee houses, to the schemes of Victorian utilitarian reformers, the early environmentalists of the mid-twentieth century, and much more. Stopping along the way to pick up thinkers such as Adam Smith himself, Edmund Burke and Karl Marx.

Panellists:

Anton Howes is the author of Arts and Minds: How the Royal Society of Arts Changed a Nation, historian-in-residence at the Royal Society of Arts, and was previously an economic history lecturer at King's College London.

Dr Madsen Pirie is the co-founder and President of the Adam Smith Institute, a UK neoliberal think tank which has been in operation since 1978.