projects die a slow death taking with them the ecosystem for a generation. Top down innovation is in fact an oxymoron yet the madness continues mainly due to the in the absence of an intuitive alternative.


If you cite the


Which is why two pieces of recent research are extremely interesting. The first seems to suggest that modern communications have made clusters less important, a kind of ´you can be in Silicon Valley without being in Silicon Valley´ and secondly that if government insists on doing something then the most actionable thing they need to do is to change the rules so SMEs can get more of the public procurement purse. So no tech parks then or reports from high priced consultants. To quote Bart Clarysse of Imperial College “the science and technology start-up support obsession must end”.


collaborative R&D programmes


science, you are likely to be accused of being anti-job. If you ignore the science and go with the flow, you are on the news cutting a ribbon with smiles all round.


established organisations practice arms.


Rune Dahl Fitjar of Norway’s International Research Institute of Stavanger and Andrés Rodríguez-Pose of the London School of Economics found that the key drivers of innovation in Norway are the communication channels that local entrepreneurs maintain to the outside world and their open-mindedness toward foreign cultures, change and new ideas. Regional and national clusters are “irrelevant for innovation.” Companies that maintain ties only with players within the same cluster are four times LESS LIKELY to innovate than those which were globally connected.


David Connell, Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Business Research, Cambridge Judge Business School, was even more pointed. Looking in particular at the engineering, physics and biotech sectors, he speaks of three myths which have underpinned policy thinking in the UK and elsewhere for decades.


1. Innovation is about solving customers’ problems not about academic invention.


2. The key source


of finance is from customers who want technology developed on their behalf. VCs are involved at a much later stage.


3. There is So no new tech


parks near universities or day care centres for ex bankers are necessary.


He


says that one of the best things the EU could do would be to simplify procurement procedures so


small


businesses could have an equal shot at getting


development contracts as more with dedicated public


There are clear parallels here in my own research, in the area of Catastrophe and Disaster, where I have frequently encountered overconfidence, groupthink or resistance to outsiders as precursors to decline (Some of the same ideas are to be found in Jared Diamond´s book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed).


The comments of Yuri Milner in Wired Magazine recently resonated strongly with what you would expect to see at the fin de siècle “Silicon Valley, despite being at the center of the digital world, is a hopelessly insular and actually rather hermetic place. Even its famous immigrant culture emphasizes joining the SV way. For all its talk of innovation, it resists almost anyone who is not part of its mainstream“


Companies that maintain


ties only with players within the same cluster are four times LESS LIKELY to innovate than those which were globally connected.


little appetite amongst the entrepreneurial companies to use the traditional 29 entrepreneurcountry


For any theory to have endured so long, it must have had some substance. So we should be wary of talk both that the worlds best known theory of national competitiveness and the worlds best known example of that theory have their best days behind them. Similarly however, when all the talk by policy makers is to replicate the existing models you have to wonder if they are planning for the past or for the future. If Jeremy Rifkin turns out to be even half right when he talks of The Third Industrial Revolution, the need now is to design


for new communication technologies to converge with new energy systems. A bit like the internet itself, it doesn’t matter so much where you get plugged in as long as you


do get plugged in.


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