A conversation in Tokyo
Last summer after teaching in China and S. Korea, I stopped by Tokyo for a few days to visited friends. During a dinner, the topic switched to the issue of technology innovation. My friend, Professor Koshiro told me: “Our economy is slowing down in the past few years, so we are planning to promote innovations to create jobs and speed up the economy. Our government will invest billions of dollars in developing several new technology parks and encourage more startups.”
I told him: “I do not think you can create innovation, regardless of how much money you invest. Innovations begin with entrepreneurs who came up with ideas and develop new technology to solve problems. I do not think building technology parks to encourage startups is a good investment. Startups can begin at any place, any time. Steve Jobs started Apple in a garage, not in a technology park. Google was created in the apartment of Larry Page, not in a laboratory. To encourage innovation, it is better to improve the education systems and let innovations happen naturally by the people.”
My friend explained: “But our plan is to place more technology companies, more startups in one place that can be managed by a government agency. They will select and fund these small startups and help them to grow into midsize companies, employ more people and improve our economy.”
I disagreed: “Government cannot make innovation happen, that is not their job. If you look into similar attempts in other countries, you will see that most of them failed. Russian Technology Parks have failed; Chinese technology parks also failed, and nearly all technology parks all over the world also failed. Because technology parks are designed for manufacturing, not innovation. You need scientists, engineers, and technology entrepreneurs to create innovations, not a physical location. A few years ago, Russia created a government-managed “Science City,” outside Moscow to compete with Silicon Valley. They spent hundreds of million dollars to build modern technology laboratories, but only construction companies were happy and made money, but you do not see any successful company there. China has invested billions of dollars in developing several technology parks across the country, but the results were a lot of empty buildings and modern laboratories without anything in it. Most technology parks failed because physical places do not work, especially if they are managing by the government. Today you do not hear much about these failures on newspapers because no one admitted the mistake.”
My friend seemed confused: “You do not think an economic plan to create technology parks and bringing businesses, startups, universities, and researchers together in a central location will work?
I explained: “It seems logical to many people but in my opinion, it does not work. Innovations begin with education and people. Instead of building technology parks, you should invest more in education, in teacher training, in raising the salary of teachers so they can focus on teaching. With proper technology education, people will have the knowledge and skills, and some of them will innovate, create products and start their company. I do not think technology parks or government can make innovation happen but the advanced knowledge of a group of people can. For example, Silicon Valley is the center of innovations and startups because there are many highly technical people live and work there. These people are developing new ideas, new products, new technology and competing for a piece of the market. In Silicon Valley, technology knowledge is the ingredient for startups. Entrepreneurs develop technology, hardware, software, search engines, social media, and these things continue to create more demand for faster, better and highly innovated products.”
I believe entrepreneurs are key to innovations and economic prosperity, but to develop entrepreneurs you need to start with a good education system, especially an education system that focuses on Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM). To improve the economy, governments should invest in education as a priority, and the investment should focus more on teachers' training, as well as a new method of teaching to develop a new generation of highly creative, and highly skilled entrepreneurs who will start their companies and contribute to the economy.
Sources
- Blogs of Prof. John Vu, Carnegie Mellon University
