Thomas Friedman says the secret of America’s sauce is its institutions that nurture innovation.
America is the greatest engine of innovation that has ever existed, and it can’t be duplicated anytime soon, because it is the product of a multitude of factors: extreme freedom of thought, an emphasis on independent thinking, a steady immigration of new minds, a risk-taking culture with no stigma attached to trying and failing, a noncorrupt bureaucracy, and financial markets and a venture capital system that are unrivaled at taking new ideas and turning them into global products.
“You have this whole ecosystem [that constitutes] a unique crucible for innovation,” said Nandan Nilekani, the C.E.O. of Infosys, India’s I.B.M. “I was in Europe the other day and they were commiserating about the 400,000 [European] knowledge workers who have gone to live in the U.S. because of the innovative environment there. The whole process where people get an idea and put together a team, raise the capital, create a product and mainstream it that can only be done in the U.S. It can’t be done sitting in India. The Indian part of the equation [is to help] these innovative [U.S.] companies bring their products to the market quicker, cheaper and better, which increases the innovative cycle there. It is a complimentarity we need to enhance.”
That is so right. As Robert Hof, a tech writer for Business Week, noted, U.S. tech workers “must keep creating leading edge technologies that make their companies more productive especially innovations that spark entirely new markets.” The same tech innovations that produced outsourcing, he noted, also produced eBay, Amazon.com, Google and thousands of new jobs along with them.
