Any entrepreneur who hasn’t lived in a cave in the last twenty years knows that we are living through a period of “creative destruction.” Many a business book has taught us about the role of innovation destroying, creating, and reshaping industries, from Peter Druckers’s Innovation and Entrepreneurship to Andy Grove’s Only the Paranoid Survive. The intellectual godfather of many of the ideas in these books, now part of the popular vernacular, is a Joseph Schumpeter who coined the term “creative destruction” in one of his last books, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy, but who had written on this theme for much of the first half of the twentieth century. His contemporary, John Maynard Keynes, wrote, “Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.” And so it is with Schumpeter who has shaped much of modern thinking on dynamic competition, where monopolies come and go, how industries are created and destroyed, and the central role the entrepreneur plays in human progress.

A wonderful new book, by business historian Thomas McCraw, Prophet of Innovation, describes the fascinating life of Schumpeter and his contributions to economic and business thinking. Professional economists sometimes neglect Schumpeter because although he supported the use of mathematics in economics, he himself did not engage in much technical analysis and he added few building blocks to neo-classical economics. But during a time when most economists were focused on short run competition within industries, Schumpeter persisted in keeping the flame of dynamic competition alive. There’s been a resurgence of interest in his work among economists and business strategists—not surprising given the wave of creative destruction that has fanned out across industries since the early 1980s.

Aside from “creative destruction,” Schumpeter is perhaps most famous for observing that his goal in life was to become the world’s greatest economist, lover and horseman and that he had only failed with the horses. McCraw’s book leaves out the horses, but has plenty of the rest which makes this a pleasurable read.