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Turn Detroit into Drone Valley
Very interesting article by the ever so brilliant Mark Andreessen on how best to address the problem we have with cloning silicon valley.
We’re either going top-down by focusing primarily on infrastructure—plunking down an office park next to a university—or bottom-up by focusing on just the networks. None of these efforts successfully pursue both paths at once, with government, academia and entrepreneurial communities proceeding together in lockstep—as was the case in the development of Silicon Valley.
I always believed that there is never just one solution to a problem. Especially not for a problem as complex as creating a thriving ecosystem.
Imagine a Bitcoin Valley, for instance, where some country fully legalizes cryptocurrencies for all financial functions. Or a Drone Valley, where a particular region removes all legal barriers to flying unmanned aerial vehicles locally. A Driverless Car Valley in a city that allows experimentation with different autonomous car designs, redesigned roadways and safety laws. A Stem Cell Valley. And so on.
What an invigorating vision, innit?
- focus more on driving regulatory competition between city, state and national governments. i.e, rethink the regulatory barriers, or simply put, relax the laws.
- Think of it as a sort of “global arbitrage” around permissionless innovation—the freedom to create new technologies without having to ask the powers that be for their blessing. Entrepreneurs can take advantage of the difference between opportunities in different regions, where innovation in a particular domain of interest may be restricted in one region, allowed and encouraged in another, or completely legal in still another. For example, the laws and guidelines for using drones or taxing bitcoin already vary widely across the globe, just as they do for ride-sharing services across different cities in the United States.
- this kind of competition is probably the only way to create successful innovation clusters that can compete with the huge advantage Silicon Valley already has.
- The best defense of regulation is its use in protecting consumer interests, but the reality is that agencies and incumbents tend to watch out for their own entrenched interests and extract rents instead.