The New Geography of Innovation: How Can Russia Win the Global Technology Race?

What the paper says

The author takes Mehran Gul’s monograph, The New Geography of Innovation: The Global Contest for Breakthrough Technologies , as a point of departure to analyze the approaches Gul recommends for supporting unicorn companies as well as the scientific ideas behind his favored policies. Gul introduces the concept of the “emoji economy” — a new stage in the development of global innovation hubs, such as Silicon Valley in the United States, the Yangtze Delta in China, and London in the UK, where an environment of trust, support, creativity, and self-realization may be represented symbolically as a smiling face. In the new technology race and especially in pursuit of artificial intelligence, the winners will be those countries and regions that can create such hubs of unicorns by means of a favorable business climate, a culture of creativity, abundant human capital, and an effective innovation system, including supporting infrastructure and access to financing. Thus, the success of Silicon Valley in California was ensured by a combination of the favorable conditions of the southwest coast of the United States, the concentration of expertise and infrastructure at a research university (Stanford), an influx of students and creative professionals from around the world, government funding for scientific research including for defense, and the commercialization facilitated by a stream of government contracts, venture capital investment and the startups it supported. This ensured that the United States took the lead in creating new technologies. Nevertheless, the prevalence of digital monopolies, the high cost of living, and the toxic corporate culture of California offer an opportunity to new competing clusters in China, Europe, South Korea, and Singapore. In the next stage, success will depend less on the quality of research and inventions than on the ability to translate scientific ideas into sought-after products and services. Constructive entrepreneurship will be crucial in creating durable companies with high growth potential from scratch and then facilitating their long-term development. This means that emoji economy hubs are competing globally for that kind of entrepreneur, for their firms, and for highly skilled professionals. This line of thinking from Gul’s book has underpinned the author’s recommendations for Russia as the country heads toward its persistent goal of achieving technological leadership.