Futuríveis
quinta-feira, abril 07, 2005
A Supremacia do Silicon Valley na Economia do Conhecimento
...
Before the bubble burst, people around the world would ask me what accounted for the valley’s dominance. I tended to list five factors.
First, and most important, the place had a culture of risk. Failure was common, and considered a good thing, and a step on a ladder toward something better, if one failed in the right way - that is, not stupidly. In many other places, especially Europe, failure has been a career killer.
Second, the place is rolling in money with a serious proportion of the world’s venture capital invested from there.
Third, there’s an enormous pool of human capital, and of specialist service businesses that can help budding entrepreneurs get up to speed in a hurry. You can build a company off the shelf with a few phone calls.
Fourth, great research universities, such as Stanford and the University of California-Berkeley, have been instrumental in creating that people pool. Moreover, they’ve institutionally created strong ties to the business community. The entrepreneurial culture exists, for good and ill, inside the universities.
Finally, the weather is great. If you can afford a house, the valley is a great place to live.
But those advantages are shrinking, in part because communications and collaboration technologies have shrunk the world.
And we are also seeing something unprecedented: the emergence of a well-educated, hard-working pool of talent, which will include hundreds of millions of people in China, India and other nations.
Many speak English fluently, and are willing to work for a fraction of what Americans expect. This is a praiseworthy trend in a big-picture sense. Raising the standard of living in developing nations helps the global economy and, in theory, will reduce internal political tensions (though exacerbate them in other ways).
Business leaders understand what is happening. I remember when Craig Barrett, the chief executive of Intel, stopped by the San Jose Mercury News, Silicon Valley’s daily newspaper, in early 2004.
He brought a warning: that the new world had brought with it a reality the valley in particular, and America in general, were not close to being ready to handle, citing the shifts in the global labour pool.
I asked him if this meant a generation of lowered expectations for Americans, and he replied that he didn’t see any way around it.
America’s political leaders are disturbingly oblivious to the shift. They would rather increase the nation’s unsustainable twin deficits, budgetary and trade, than boost a serious national commitment to the things that might make a difference in the long term, such as investments in basic research, infrastructure and education.
America still has a lead in entrepreneurial risk-taking, the single most important characteristic of a high-tech economy. But the world is catching up. This is not to suggest that Europe and Asia regard failure (at least the right kind) as a necessary badge in a business career, but it is no longer seen as the worst thing that can happen to an individual.
As entrepreneurship spreads, other nations may actually come to have an advantage in key respects. For example, America’s insane healthcare system can lock employees, especially older ones, to their current employers offering benefits that taxpayers cover in other industrialised nations.
Do not misunderstand. Silicon Valley is not going to shrivel up and die. There are too many people doing too much good work for that to happen. But it is not a tragedy to see the valley’s absolute power muted a bit. Overall, this is good for the world.
...
FT.com / Home UK - Dan Gillmor: Not the very worst thing to have happened
Before the bubble burst, people around the world would ask me what accounted for the valley’s dominance. I tended to list five factors.
First, and most important, the place had a culture of risk. Failure was common, and considered a good thing, and a step on a ladder toward something better, if one failed in the right way - that is, not stupidly. In many other places, especially Europe, failure has been a career killer.
Second, the place is rolling in money with a serious proportion of the world’s venture capital invested from there.
Third, there’s an enormous pool of human capital, and of specialist service businesses that can help budding entrepreneurs get up to speed in a hurry. You can build a company off the shelf with a few phone calls.
Fourth, great research universities, such as Stanford and the University of California-Berkeley, have been instrumental in creating that people pool. Moreover, they’ve institutionally created strong ties to the business community. The entrepreneurial culture exists, for good and ill, inside the universities.
Finally, the weather is great. If you can afford a house, the valley is a great place to live.
But those advantages are shrinking, in part because communications and collaboration technologies have shrunk the world.
And we are also seeing something unprecedented: the emergence of a well-educated, hard-working pool of talent, which will include hundreds of millions of people in China, India and other nations.
Many speak English fluently, and are willing to work for a fraction of what Americans expect. This is a praiseworthy trend in a big-picture sense. Raising the standard of living in developing nations helps the global economy and, in theory, will reduce internal political tensions (though exacerbate them in other ways).
Business leaders understand what is happening. I remember when Craig Barrett, the chief executive of Intel, stopped by the San Jose Mercury News, Silicon Valley’s daily newspaper, in early 2004.
He brought a warning: that the new world had brought with it a reality the valley in particular, and America in general, were not close to being ready to handle, citing the shifts in the global labour pool.
I asked him if this meant a generation of lowered expectations for Americans, and he replied that he didn’t see any way around it.
America’s political leaders are disturbingly oblivious to the shift. They would rather increase the nation’s unsustainable twin deficits, budgetary and trade, than boost a serious national commitment to the things that might make a difference in the long term, such as investments in basic research, infrastructure and education.
America still has a lead in entrepreneurial risk-taking, the single most important characteristic of a high-tech economy. But the world is catching up. This is not to suggest that Europe and Asia regard failure (at least the right kind) as a necessary badge in a business career, but it is no longer seen as the worst thing that can happen to an individual.
As entrepreneurship spreads, other nations may actually come to have an advantage in key respects. For example, America’s insane healthcare system can lock employees, especially older ones, to their current employers offering benefits that taxpayers cover in other industrialised nations.
Do not misunderstand. Silicon Valley is not going to shrivel up and die. There are too many people doing too much good work for that to happen. But it is not a tragedy to see the valley’s absolute power muted a bit. Overall, this is good for the world.
...
FT.com / Home UK - Dan Gillmor: Not the very worst thing to have happened
posted by CMT, 11:02 da manhã
