Mehran Gul’s The New Geography of Innovation is a meticulously researched and remarkably insightful cartography of the evolving global tech landscape. I embarked on this reading with an almost philosophical curiosity, particularly given the ongoing debates about where the true levers of technological progress reside. Gul’s journey through various innovation ecosystems is not just informative but profoundly revealing, especially in his nuanced acceptance of Silicon Valley’s enduring, indeed accelerating, dominance.
Gul starts by framing the familiar narrative: the ascendant China as the “precocious student”, out-executing its teachers with breathtaking speed in areas such as AI deployment, EVs, and mobile payments. His detailed accounts of Tencent’s meteoric rise, China’s “deployment advantage,” and its massive state-backed initiatives are compelling. We see how the “lived change index” in places like Shenzhen fosters a public highly receptive to new technologies, providing an unparalleled testbed for scale. For a while, the book holds out the tantalising possibility that the long-predicted shift in technological gravity might indeed be happening, propelled by sheer will, speed, and state-backed capital.
Unassailable leadership
However, as Gul delves deeper into the foundational elements of true innovation, particularly in ‘Steeples of Excellence,’ his analysis subtly but decisively pivots. Through the lens of seasoned Silicon Valley figures like John Hennessy and the empirical evidence of AI concentration, he confronts the undeniable reality: the U.S., and specifically the Bay Area, isn’t just holding steady, its innovation engine is accelerating. The sheer clustering of pivotal AI companies like OpenAI and Anthropic in ‘Cerebral Valley’, combined with Nvidia’s stranglehold on AI chips, presents a picture of formidable, perhaps unassailable, leadership.
Gul points out that the U.S.’ ability to attract and integrate global talent, its unique venture capital ecosystem, driven by FOMO and a willingness to “manufacture courage”, forms a flywheel that others, including China, struggle to replicate. The shift in Chinese AI talent, from home-grown heroes moving to the U.S. to firms relocating their headquarters to skirt geopolitical tensions, underscores Gul’s ultimate conclusion: America’s commanding lead in frontier technologies is not only vast but, by most conventional metrics, widening. The world, Gul asserts, increasingly positions itself as an extension of Silicon Valley, rather than its challenger.
What the future holds
But here, I diverge from the implied valorisation of this trajectory. While Gul pragmatically accepts the data points signalling American scale and growth, his exploration of ‘Busting Monasteries’ in Europe, particularly through the evolving perspective of Saul Klein, offers what I personally find to be a far more critical and ultimately more important pathway for the future of innovation.
Klein, the venture capitalist who initially aimed to export the “Silicon Valley mindset” to Europe, ultimately realises its inherent flaws — the “aggressive, hard-driving culture”, surveillance capitalism, privacy breaches, and anti-competitive behaviours. He posits Europe’s unique opportunity: not to replicate Silicon Valley’s model, but to go beyond it, to build a “values-driven ecosystem” rooted in ethics, sustainability, equity, and privacy.
This “European challenge to the orthodoxy” is the truly disruptive innovation the world needs. We’ve witnessed the social and ethical fallout of pure, unrestrained “move fast and break things” capitalism. The DeepMind story, with its internal struggle over ethical control and the eventual separation attempts from Google, vividly illustrates the cost of soulless growth. Switzerland’s DP-3T contact tracing protocol, prioritising decentralisation and privacy over mere efficiency, stands as a testament to what value-driven tech can achieve. Germany’s “New Mittelstand”, focusing on “deep tech” and long-term, multi-generational planning rather than quarterly gains, may appear slower on the surface but offers a more resilient and responsible model.
Gul correctly observes that the world’s newer tech economies are becoming “strikingly similar” in their operational models — DARPA-like agencies, venture-backed startups, casual corporate cultures. This convergence, however, is a superficial one. What Europe, under the banner of values-based innovation, is attempting is a fundamental re-architecture of innovation purpose. It’s not about inventing slightly better mousetraps, nor about efficient deployment at scale. It’s about designing technology that serves a holistic societal good, not just maximising capital appreciation or corporate power.
The challenge is immense, as Gul acknowledges with the struggles of Graphcore or the fragmented European capital markets. Yet, for a futurist, the crucial question isn’t simply “who builds the biggest company?” but “who builds the best future?” Silicon Valley, by Gul’s account, leads in making new technologies happen. But Europe, through the emerging vision of its innovators and policymakers, is uniquely positioned to lead in defining what it means for those technologies to be good.
The relentless pursuit of capital appreciation, while undeniably efficient at generating wealth, has often come at significant social cost. Europe’s bet, then, is that the ultimate differentiator, the truly superior innovation, will lie in building technologies that are not only profitable and ingenious but also ethical and sustainable. That is the kind of innovation that builds resilient societies, not just fortunes, and for the long term, that’s more important than any fleeting trillion-dollar valuation.