Differences between revisions 24 and 25
⇤ ← Revision 24 as of 2026-06-23 06:40:36 →
Size: 15004
Editor: KeithLofstrom
Comment:
← Revision 25 as of 2026-06-23 06:44:10 → ⇥
Size: 15045
Editor: KeithLofstrom
Comment:
Deletions are marked like this. Additions are marked like this.
Line 127: Line 127:
  . I write this in 2026. Are they halfway there? :-( Frameworks aren't ASML wafer steppers, much less huge class 1 fabs deploying dozens of them)
 		   . I write this in 2026. Are they halfway there? :-(     . Frameworks aren't ASML wafer steppers, much less huge class 1 fabs deploying dozens of them
  . The UK's last fab closed in 2001

The New Geography of Innovation

The Global Contest for Breakthrough Technologies

.p001 Introduction , Capitalism with an Emoji Face

  • p009 Fig 1: Top ten #private >$B tech companies - US 1720, China 438, UK 183, Israel 119, India 117 ... 10

  • p010 Fig 2: Top ten venture dollars invested - US 190.2, China 38.5 , UK 16.2, India 13.5, ... 3.4
  • p012 Fig 4: WIPO Global Innovation Index - Switzerland 66, Sweden 62.6, US 61.7, ... 56.6 China

.p015 Ch1 . The Precocious Student

  • p015 David Wallerstein at Naspers then Tencent

  • p016 UC Berkeley grad
  • p017 Tencent peaked near $1T in 2021, dropped, regained in 2026

  • p017 WeChat IM. social media, and mobile payment for smartphones

  • p018 everyone in China uses WeChat, essential for smartphones

  • p019 Tencent now major multinational investor in gaming companies
  • p020 Tencent Pictures produces US franchise movies; Terminator etc

  • p021 investments in Moon Express and Planetary Resources (defunct 2018)

  • p022 in 2024 more investment flows out of China $163B than in $18.6B

  • p022 DoD added International Data Group to list of Chinese military companies

  • p023 US and China venture firms face saturated domestic markets

  • p024 Aixtron - German CVD manufacturing equipment website, China acquisition blocked

  • p024 Neura Robotics, China acquisition blocked wikipedia

  • p025 Hussein Kanji V.C. "We can't play there but they can play here"

  • p025 Lilium Munich flying car company, insolvent 2024

  • p026 US and Europe proclaim decoupling from China while increasing trade by 25%
  • p027 Tencent divested of 5% stake in Tesla
  • p028 Wallerstein: encourage positives, we aren't clear about desired destination

  • p029 MSRA Microsoft Research Asia in Bejing, 2015 paper Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition layering neural networks improves performance

  • p030 >250K citations on Google Scholar

  • p030 2015 ImageNet competition, MRSA submission surpassed human level performance

  • p031 In 2022, China surpassed US in the Nature index

  • p033 1300 foreign companies with Chinese advanced research labs

  • p033 Ya Qin Zhang matriculated at 12yo to

    • USTC University of Science and Technology, "China's Caltech", in Hefei

    • finished PhD at GWU

    • IEEE Fellow age 31 in 1997

  • p034 now teaching at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsinghua_University, dean of AI Research

  • p035 Six of ten top universities are in China, ahead of US

  • p037 ChatGLM, Chinese variant of ChatGPT

  • p037 Zhipu rebranded Z.ai in 2025, follows OpenAI a year later

  • p045 Waymo car attacked SF Chinatown 2024

    • book mentions only anti-Waymo incidents, not Waymo related-deaths and traffic felonies due to inadequate design.

  • p046 Shenzhen was a fishing village with 30K residents in 1980.

    • 17.5M in 2020, third after Shanghai and Beijing
  • p046 40yo, many died escaping to Hong Kong, today net inflow to mainland

  • p047 Zak Dychtwald

  • p047 1980 China GDP 2% of world, 2025, 20%
  • p048 online shops, free same day delivery in major cities
  • p048 store QR codes reveal entire supply chain from farm to shelf

  • p049 95% of citizens satisfied with government, each day better than the last (mistake in book: "next")

  • p050 State-owned companies 60% of listed market cap. 10 largest and 75% of Chinese Fortune 500 companies are-state-ownen
    • Crowds out private initiative, creative destruction off-limits
  • p050 Chinese IPOs required to be profitable, American Airbnb and Amazon were ont

  • p051 China forbids cryptocurrency, for-profit tutoring. Less than 3hrs/wk of video games -> gaming sector meltdown

  • p052 Deng Xiaoping "Let some get rich first", inequality moved from Nordic to US levels
  • p052 2021, curb "barbaric growth" with "Common Prosperity"

  • p053 01.AI model global top three with OpenAI and Google

.p055 Ch2 . Steeples of Excellence

.p097 Ch3 . Busting Monasteries

  • p097 DeepMind AlphaGo

    • London's first globally relevant tech company in 50 years, only 8 in UK

  • p099 commentariat

  • p101 How the U.K. Became One of the Poorest Countries in Western Europe 2022 The Atlantic - paywall

  • p107 Skype King Atomico Index

  • p112 without London, the rest of the UK would be poorer per capita than any US state (and the rest probably still is)

  • p114 Stoke, the "capital of Brexit", "a top place to smash a glass bottle for no reason"

  • p115 Radix alternative to blockchain

  • p115n Radix Blog 2018 Feb. 8 "Why blockchains don't scale"

    • "Every node processes each and every transaction, keeping a record of the entire blockchain."

    • Wrong! Neither Mehran Gul nor blogger Dan Hughes mentions Merkel Trees, which is how many individual transaction hashes are combined into trees of hierarchical hashes and and one root hash. For a binary tree of N transactions, the hash process to VERIFY ONE individual transaction uses order log2(N) time. Tracing a single transaction out of a million transactions takes only twice as long as one out of a thousand transactions, and one out of a trillion takes only twice as long as a million. Meanwhile, computation continues to get faster, hence as the tree grows from a million to a trillion, the hardware speed will more than double, and the verification time will become smaller.

    • Organizing and distributing all that data is a challenge; the global cost of that may be much larger than the block reward in bitcoins, but that cost is distributed among thousands (millions?) of miners and aggregators
  • p115n 2014 New Yorker, 2024 Dec. 15 John Colapinto "Material Question"

  • p117 graphene "200 times stronger than steel" ... misleading, an iron monolayer is much weaker, but we use iron in 3D crystals; weaker per bond but stronger per 3D volume, given graphene's two dimensional nature and frictionless connection in the third dimension.

  • p117 "A football-field-sized graphene sheet could support the weight of a car"
    • perhaps ... assuming you could magically anchor the frictionless edges of the sheet, even with the much smaller tensile force distributed over 280 meters of edge.
  • p117 "graphene is a better conductor than silicon"

    • The carrier mobility and saturation velocities are very high, but this is for a very thin monolayer, with fewer carriers than a 500 micrometer silicon wafer. Fmax is still lower than a 500GHz SiGe HBT

  • p118 "In (March) 2023, the UK government unveiled the Science and Technology Framework to turn the country into a scientific superpower by 2030."

    • I write this in 2026. Are they halfway there? :-(

    • Frameworks aren't ASML wafer steppers, much less huge class 1 fabs deploying dozens of them
    • The UK's last fab closed in 2001

  • here is where I stopped reading; another library patron wants the book. The book isn't great, so I may not request it again

.p137 Ch4 . Hyper Gap

  • p1

.p168 Ch5 . Smart Nation

  • p1

.p201 Ch6 . Small Wonder

  • p2

.p236 Ch7 . The New Mittelstand

  • p2

.p267 Ch8 . Importing Genius

  • p2

.p300 Conclusion . Social Animals

  • p3

GeographyInnovation (last edited 2026-06-23 06:46:24 by KeithLofstrom)