The New Geography of Innovation
The Global Contest for Breakthrough Technologies
Mehran Gul . 2026 . Bvtn Lib 338.084
.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
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
2018 book Young China
- 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
p056 Michael Moritz The Little Kingdom: The Private Story of Apple Computer 1984
p058 Victor W. Hwang biography entrepreneur moved to Kansas ??
- p059 entrepreneurial rainforest now farm-like, culture spread elsewhere
p059 Keith Rabois "Valley" -> Detroit, but technology future bright, in different place with different people
p060 Mt. Gox 2014 failure
p062 Chainalysis cracked case in 2023, traced to BTC-e in Russia
p064 John Hennessy Stanford CS->President 2000-2016, Alphabet Chair 2018 - present
- p065 Hennessy says AI next, bay area 5x anybody else
p066 Nvidia dominates AI
- p067 Nvidia 80% of GPUs
p067 High end Nvidia H200 Hopper $40K
p071 Patrick Collison (Stripe) "The fact that the talent is here or we can bring the talent here, that's what makes the whole thing work."
p072 DOJ China Initiative ended 2022 Feb, lingering consequences
p075 "RISC is now used in 99% of all computer chips" ... Citation Needed
- MIPS, SPARC, POWER, (early) ARM are RISC, x86 is CISC
- p077 1884, 15yo Leland Stanford Jr. dies of typhoid in Italy
p078 Father Amasa Leland Stanford tells mother "The children of California shall be our children"
- p079 1885 founds Leland Stanford Junior University, funded with $45M, most of family's personal wealth, plus 8180 acres of Palo Alto farmland, largest landowner in the Santa Clara valley, now worth more than $20B.
- p080 ~1900, Palo Alto grew 1/3 of the world's cherries, pears, apricots, and prunes
p081 Stanford U. land rich, academic mediocre. Stanford "IQ test" psychologist/eugenicist Lewis Terman father of engineer/professor Frederick Terman
- "steeples of excellence": world-class eminence in specific narrow fields rather than mediocre competence in all fields
p082 Palo Alto capital of the radio revolution. Federal Radio Telegraph Company913 Emerson Street
p083 Vannevar Bush was Terman's advisor at MIT, in 1941 head of the Office of Scientific Research and Development
p084 Terman started Radio Research Lab at Harvard in 1942, grew to 850 people in 2 years, radar jammers and chaff
p087 1951 square mile Stanford Industrial Park now Stanford Research Park
p087 1957 "Traitorous Eight" founded Fairchild Semiconductor
p089 AnnaLee Saxenian 1994 Regional Advantage: Culture and Competition in Silicon Valley and Route 128 PSU basement HC107.C22 N677 1994 $3+ship used
p091 1980 top 3 were TI, Motorola, and Philips (not American; Eindhoven Netherlands )
- p092 1986 top 3 were NEC, Toshiba, and Hitachi
p095 Kleiner PerkinsJohn Doerr convinces Eric Schmidt to leave Intuit to lead Google
p095 UUNET founded 1987 Virginia
p096 Journalist Sebastien Mallaby calls venture capital a machine for manufacturing courage
.p097 Ch3 . Busting Monasteries
- 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
- 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
- The appropriate British vern is "wanking"
- 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