Less Copying, More Innovating

More lamenting why we aren’t Silicon Valley <a title=”Ellee Seymour - ProActive PR: “I hope George Osborne reads this blog”” href=”http://elleeseymour.blogspot.com/2006/06/i-hope-george-osborne-reads-this-blog.html”>via Ellee Seymour</a>, only this time worryingly it’s the shadow chancellor complaining.

To begin with, I thought there were some good points in his article, but the more I think about it the less convinced I become.

Why does it matter how many universities we have in the world’s top 20? I don’t remember any of my peers at school even thinking of going abroad to a different uni, so we aren’t losing tomorrow’s startup founders there. My experience of university was that it tended to be rather academic, and not too tuned to business, so encouraging that would be more useful to foster more startups.

I’m also unconvinced as to how useful patents are. Myspace doesn’t have anything in that hasn’t been done before (and given how ropey it is, most likely done better before).

All these efforts and initiatives trying to emulate Silicon Valley are pointless and will ultimately be futile. If I wanted to be part of Sililcon Valley I’d have gone there. I’m not yet sure what we do need to encourage more startups, but we should be looking at how to build our own success, not copy someone else’s.