Decoding the Innovation Process

For anyone fascinated by questions about technological innovation, why it happens, what makes it happen and so on, this book has some wonderful case studies.

- AJIT BALAKRISHNAN

For example, France saw the emergence of a private initiative, Station F, which has become a symbol of France's ambition to become the tech capital of Europe. When Emmanuel Macron inaugurated the facility in 2017, he made a pitch for why this is the place for the smartest people with the biggest dreams. "I like to compare a researcher in Harvard with a researcher in France," he said. "[In France], school is free and excellent, healthcare is free, and there's a retirement system. On the other side, there's nothing." It took them five years to pull that off, but in 2022, Hugging Face became the first startup to cross a billion-dollar valuation. The young company quickly became the central hub of the artificial intelligence (AI) community. It's the most widely used online platform where AI experts and enthusiasts come together to share their work and collaborate on building machine learning models.

We all know the United States as the source of just about all the technologies that define modern life: Personal computers, operating systems, smartphones, e-commerce, web browsers, email, search engines, social networks, electric cars, and so on. And most of the tech companies that created and monetised these technologies are also in the US. This book asks: Is that changing?