A Brief Rebuttal to the Techno-Urban Fantasy that Silicon Valley can be Replicated By all available evidence, Silicon Valley cannot be cloned. This fact, though inconvenient to policy makers and economic development strategists the world over, remains stubbornly true. The Valley’s mystique persists: a mythic land of hoodies and stock…
Innovation and Technology
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Stop trying to build the next Silicon Valley. It can’t be done (and nor should it).
In contemporary economic development circles, there are few ideas more persistent or more poorly examined than the desire to recreate Silicon Valley. For over two decades, the world has watched a parade of billion-dollar unicorns prance out of Silicon Valley. In economic development circles, it’s now taken as gospel: if…
Innovation and Technology
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Build Something Massive (And Other Bad Ideas)
The motto of the Creative Destruction Lab – “Build something massive” – captures, perhaps a little too neatly, the central affliction of contemporary entrepreneurship: the conflation of magnitude with merit. “Massive” has become shorthand for ambition, but without qualifying what that mass is composed of- or directed toward – it…
Innovation and Technology
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“From now on we’ll be fighting only for power”: from social media to AI
“That means,” Colonel Aureliano Buendía said, smiling when the reading was over, “that all we’re fighting for is power.”“They’re tactical changes,” one of the delegates replied. “Right now the main thing is to broaden the popular base of the war. Then we’ll have another look.”One of Colonel Aureliano Buendía’s political…
Innovation and Technology
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AI + Quantum Computing = Fear-Driven Innovation
In the grand theatre of modern technological ambition, Silicon Valley increasingly resembles a solution in frantic pursuit of a problem. Quantum computing is a case in point: the race to break RSA encryption is a global sprint that all seems a bit unnecessary. RSA may not be perfect, but it…
Innovation and Technology
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Canadian innovation doesn’t need more money: it needs a brilliant vision
An article published this month in Science and Public Policy makes the startling claim that “between 74 and 90 per cent of total spending on support for business research and development (R&D) each year since 2000” has been distributed not as one would expect by the Ministry of Innovation, Science and…
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Cockroach by Ian McEwen
A quick twist on the Metamorphosis In a reverse twist on Kafka’s Metamorphosis, a fairly ordinary and even likeable cockroach, wakes up in the body of Jim Sams, the British Prime Minister. This is an occasionally funny book that describes an attempt by the Cockroach wing of the party to…
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A load of books loaned to me by J.K.
J.K. loaned me a pile of books. Among The Thugs by Bill Buford “This is, if you like, the answer to the hundred-dollar question: why do young males riot every Saturday? They do it for the same reason that another generation drank too much, or smoked dope, or took hallucinogenic…
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The Chancellor by Kati Marton
The biography is interesting both for what it says and for what it omits. It’s remarkably thin in terms of content or juicy gossip. Merkel developed deep habits of paranoia when she lived in East Germany, so much so that years later she refused to use text or email. Her…
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Genius Makers by Cade Metz
This book is about the renaissance of artificial intelligence (via neural networks) in the early 2000s. The bones of the technology were developed at Cornell University in the 1950s but due to a combination of skepticism in the field and lack of computing power, the idea of the neural network…