From NPR: Joe's Big Idea
3 Clues To How Geography Fuels Innovation
By Jessica Stoller-Conrad and Nancy Shute
The image of the lone genius toiling in isolation, finally emerging with a brilliant new concept is compelling, even romantic. Too bad it's not true.
Instead, innovation thrives in ecosystems, much as microbes flourish in a warm, cozy petri dish.
"There's an important geography to where innovation happens," says AnnaLee Saxenian, dean of the School of Information at the University of California, Berkeley, who studies how regional differences affect innovation.
"Innovation is a social process, not just an individual process," Saxenian says. Social interaction among people speeds incremental improvements in an idea. People both compete and collaborate to come up with something better. And old-fashioned physical proximity still seems to help the most, even in the age of the Internet....