Global openness called key to Silicon Valley

SAN FRANCISCO — The success of Silicon Valley lies in its openness, but it could be challenged by moving away from a global attitude, a US expert on innovation says.

In a recent interview with Xinhua, Richard Dasher, director of the US-Asia Technological Management Center (US-ATMC) at Stanford University since 1994, said one of the most impressive things over the past two decades is the structural change in China’s innovation ecosystem.

“I’m seeing very much a system that has evolved according to a good balance of institutions, including capital markets, labor force and governance practices. China’s industrial base, especially the three big companies, BAT, have become more global, and the way the startups and tech giants play are different,” said Dasher, who has been watching closely the technology development in both the United States and Asia.

BAT is an acronym referring to China’s leading internet companies — Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent — which are often likened to Alphabet subsidiary Google, e-commerce giant Amazon.com and Facebook, the world’s largest social media network.

“That’s a structural change in the economy and it represents a different, a new kind of environment for opportunities,” Dasher said, adding that for a startup to survive in China, it has to have an idea that is not already being done by the big companies, and this dynamic pushes startups to newer emerging markets.

He said that although the focus of Silicon Valley has changed over the same period, and people can see a new technology wave in a regular pattern every seven or eight years, Silicon Valley really hasn’t changed its mentality.

“It’s almost an obsession with making the biggest idea as fast as possible and growing it as much as possible,” said Dasher, whose research and teaching focus on the flow of people, knowledge and capital in innovation systems.

Having studied as a graduate student and worked as a professor at Stanford University for several decades, Dasher said that the secret behind Stanford’s success as the heart of Silicon Valley is setting high academic standards, attracting the most talented faculty and encouraging open university-industry cooperation.

With the US-ATMC as an example, when the center was started, the whole field of technology management was emerging as an academic discipline, and Dasher made a decision not to create an academic major in technology management.

Instead, he thought that technology management was something that larger numbers of students from various traditional disciplines should be studying.

In many of his courses, he has been insisting on inviting speakers from the industrial community to give lectures, opening lectures to the public and encouraging connections.

XINHUA