ABSTRACT
Chapter 2 has described, albeit very briefly, some of the major innovations of the Industrial Revolution in Britain and their subsequent effects on the growth of firms, industrial sectors and the economy as a whole. Their success was apparently due to a combination of imaginative entrepreneurship, entry into potential growth markets, access to the capital needed for investment in the new factories, and technical inventiveness, sometimes but not always protected by patents and, sometimes but not always, supported by contacts with the world of science.
