All posts tagged: innovation

Hong Kong, mon Amour

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Message Personnel. Voici maintenant près de 7 mois que je vis à Hong Kong. Cette ville et ses habitants me fascinent toujours autant. Hong Kong est une ville unique au monde parce qu’à mon sens, elle est ce parfait point de basculement entre l’Ouest et l’Est. Elle vous est à la fois totalement familière et totalement étrangère. C’est une jungle urbaine où l’on peut étouffer de chaleur mais avec des plages magnifiques où l’on peut passer des journées inoubliables. Elle est à la fois très chinoise et pas très chinoise. Elle fait partie d’un pays communiste tout en étant l’économie la plus libérale du monde. Très riches. Très pauvres. Elle est à la fois très belle et très laide. Hong Kong est tout et son contraire. Voilà en quoi elle me fascine. C’est une ville dont se dégage une sensuelle virilité tandis que la feminité de ses habitantes vous frappe au premier abord. A Hong Kong, tout est possible et rien ne l’est. Qu’est-ce qui a construit cette ville? La colonisation britannique avec ses guerres de …

The Geography Of Innovation Is Shifting

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When a prominent venture capitalist of California invested one billion dollars in high risk green technology, Silicon Valley recalled the world that in innovation, geography is karma. What Vinod Khosla’s story tells us is that location is crucial when dealing with innovation and technology. Thirty years earlier Vinod left India to study management at Stanford University in California. In 1981, fresh out, he founded Sun Microsystems, a computer manufacturer . Innovations do not occur anywhere but often in geographic clusters where investors, large research universities, existing technology companies, engineers, designers, artists and scientists are always willing to think outside the box. Those people are part of what Richard Florida calls the Creative Class. His paradigm asserts that innovation is the outcome of creativity, this latter being the outcome of human creation for a concrete realization which then might lead to innovation. As far as geography and clusters are concerned, the Silicon Valley has been for several decades considered as the only creative and innovative hub worldwide. This is clearly changing. The geography of innovation is shifting. For proof, start with Google, …

Questioning The Definition Of Startup

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Steve Jobs often spoke of Apple “startup culture” and the New York Times referred to the airline Virgin America as “a startup”. Today any small company operating in the digital industry tends to be defined as a startup. Hence confusion in perception, consistence and business models in the startup scene worldwide. Steve Blank, one of the most influential people in Tech and teacher at Stanford, defines a startup as “an organisation formed to search for a repeatable and scalable business model”. The key attribute is not to be a tech company. Neither to be a small company using digital and/or operating on the Internet. The key attribute is a repeatable and a scalable business model. In recent years, popular lexicon has begun equating startups with tech companies, as though the two are inherently intertwined. But let’s face it. Is Uber with a valuation record of $17bn still a startup or rather a multinational logistics company which generated $213 million revenue in 2013? Mark Babbitt, CEO at YouTern, an online community focusing on careers management, expanded …

Innovation > Debunking Public vs. Private Sector Myths

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Common sense in Economics claims that the role of the State is to overcome market failures and protect competition. According to this, public intervention is not justified unless private agents are unable to produce a satisfactory outcome for all. The drive for initiative and dynamism would belong to the private sector, whereas the State unduly protects special interests, produces absurd and penalizing regulations for entrepreneurship by wasting resources that could be better used by private firms. These arguments emerge regularly in discussions on innovation and disruption. The “Knowledge Economy” has produced a Schumpeterian Hero. The Entrepreneur has become the central pivot of economic development by taking risks to create new products and jobs that require Venture Capital and a light regulatory framework. This entrepreneurial culture has fostered the development and the myth of the Silicon Valley. In a recent study (1), Mariana Mazzucato, Professor of Economics of Innovation at the University of Sussex, shows how this myth of the Silicon Valley propagates a distorted view of the respective roles of the public sector and private …