Episode 117: Dan Breznitz
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Everyone Wants a Silicon Valley
Would you believe Cleveland used to be a hub for innovation? Now the Bay Area is the height of start ups and global technology.
It seems like everybody, no matter where they are around the world, is trying to create a Silicon valley back in their country or “Silicon hyphens.”
Dan Breznitz is the Munk Chair of Innovation Studies at the Munk School of Public Policy at the University of Toronto. He's also the co-director of their Innovation Policy Lab, as well as an author. His books include “Run of the Red Queen: Government, Innovation, Globalization,” and “Innovation in Real Places: Strategies for Prosperity in an Unforgiving World.”
Listen as Dan & Greg talk about the global fragmentation of production, innovation vs. invention, luxury shoes, and what's wrong with the intellectual property system that we have today.
Episode Quotes:
Problems with patents in the US:
“To get the patents, apart from this being really original, another problem of our current patent system, you have to describe it in such a way that anyone with common technical skills in that area would immediately know how to produce it. Because the other thing that you want to do with innovation, if you care about economic growth, is that it's extremely rapid. And that's a dilemma that has not been solved very well.”
Effects from COVID:
“If we don't change the system, what I think COVID has shown us [North America], Is that in a time of crisis, we cannot produce and innovate on the things we want.
Even if we were the first to innovate them, like the N95 masks, like ventilators. And that our obsession, what I called “techno fetishism”, our idealization of the new - has cost us greatly and made us unbelievably vulnerable.”
Thoughts on politicians in the tech spaces:
“There's my cynical rule of, if it arrived to a politician and they're really keen about a new industry, it's about seven years too late. Because seven years ago were the people who were really smart started to develop it. Around five years later, it was successful, it got to the media. And two years after it got the media, politicians say it's a safe thing to talk about.”
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