It takes a lot of innovation to survive and evolve as a species, and to thrive for a significant part of that time. What do we learn about innovation if we look at the economy over that timescale?

I am indebted to IPPR for hosting a talk by Eric Beinhocker of the McKinsey Global Institute last week, which suggested that this timescale could be instructive, even if it is way beyond the timescale we normally consider in discussions around policy and practice.

If you plot the key indicator of the economy – wealth – over time, you see around 2,000,000 years of virtually zero GDP, followed by an explosive growth in wealth over the past 150 years. What I take from this is that, for about .995% of our history, we innovated to survive and succeed, and then, in the developed world at least, turned this innovative ability overwhelmingly to wealth creation, fuelling economic growth.

Beinhocker cites estimates that the number of distinct products and services available (SKUs, for any economists reading) is now 10,000 times the number of species on the planet.

What can we learn from this perspective? On the optimistic side, it’s great to be reminded of our capacity to innovate. We have created nearly all of this in the past 200 years, which is impressive. On the other hand, of course, most innovations have been geared to allowing us to pursue personal satisfaction. Evolutionary psychology tells us that, though evolution has favoured ‘altruistic’ genes, we are more driven to pursue short-term and personal goals that we are motivated by longer-term, and altruistic ones.

For policy makers (and this is a point made in Eric’s book, Origin of Wealth) the challenge now is to shape its interventions so that economic and social innovation is low carbon. Central government has a major role to play in this, and the legal commitment to an 80% carbon reduction can be effective, if we draw lines from this obligation to our decision-making, so that it informs – and influences the cost of – the decisions we all make as individuals.

What about local government? Plenty of local authorities are making some progress in this respect, and the Carbon Reduction Commitment will focus minds when it is introduced next year. And some early work on social innovation is also coming to fruition; for example, the forthcoming Design Council event on Forum for the Future’s iTeam project.

Scaling up such initiatives should be a step on the journey to ensuring our prosperity for a long time to come.