Winner of Balsillie Prize for Public Policy
Winner of Donner Prize
A Summer Book of 2021, Financial Times
Longlisted Financial Times and McKinsey Best Business Book of the Year
A challenge to prevailing ideas about innovation and a guide to
identifying the best growth strategy for your community.
Across the world, cities and regions have wasted trillions of dollars on
blindly copying the Silicon Valley model of growth creation. Since the
early years of the information age, we've been told that economic growth
derives from harnessing technological innovation. To do this, places
must create good education systems, partner with local research
universities, and attract innovative hi-tech firms. We have lived with
this system for decades, and the result is clear: a small number of
regions and cities at the top of the high-tech industry but many more
fighting a losing battle to retain economic dynamism.
But are there other models that don't rely on a flourishing high-tech
industry? In Innovation in Real Places, Dan Breznitz argues that there
are. The purveyors of the dominant ideas on innovation have a feeble
understanding of the big picture on global production and innovation.
They conflate innovation with invention and suffer from
techno-fetishism. In their devotion to start-ups, they refuse to admit
that the real obstacle to growth for most cities is the overwhelming
power of the real hubs, which siphon up vast amounts of talent and
money. Communities waste time, money, and energy pursuing this road to
nowhere. Breznitz proposes that communities instead focus on where they
fit in the four stages in the global production process. Some are at the
highest end, and that is where the Clevelands, Sheffields, and
Baltimores are being pushed toward. But that is bad advice. Success lies
in understanding the changed structure of the global system of
production and then using those insights
to enable communities to recognize their own advantages, which in turn
allows to them to foster surprising forms of specialized innovation. As
he stresses, all localities have certain advantages relative to at least
one stage of the global production process, and the trick is in
recognizing it. Leaders might think the answer lies in high-tech or
high-end manufacturing, but more often than not, they're wrong.
Innovation in Real Places is an essential corrective to a mythology of
innovation and growth that too many places have bought into in recent
years. Best of all, it has the potential to prod local leaders into
pursuing realistic and regionally appropriate models for growth and
innovation.
