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…
Month: August 2025
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…