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New Geography of Innovation
From the winner of the Financial Times and McKinsey Bracken Bower Prize for young authors, a book that maps the billion-dollar companies springing up around the globe and the future landscape of the world economy.Global technological trends come and go. In this book, Mehran Gul maps the recent waves of technological advancement up until the current moment, as the model shifts from a system where many products are designed in the United States and assembled in China, to one where billion-dollar companies are springing up in places like China, Korea, Singapore, India and continental Europe, and innovation becomes a far more global game.
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Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews
October 12, 2025
Loved ot until I read the chapter about Germany. Reading it as a German made me laugh. It is just quite simplistic and one sided. As if you only got there, talked to 5 people and spun a narrative from that input.
And it’s understandably. He covers 8 countries in the book. My fear though: if all the chapters are as reductive and unrepresentative as the German one, it is just a nice feuilletonistic book of stories rather than a scientific or at least objective overview that I expected and/or maybe I wanted I to be.
It is not a bad book. Some interesting people and companies covered, some insights derived that where new to me and all in all a fun read. Just not as deep as I expected
And it’s understandably. He covers 8 countries in the book. My fear though: if all the chapters are as reductive and unrepresentative as the German one, it is just a nice feuilletonistic book of stories rather than a scientific or at least objective overview that I expected and/or maybe I wanted I to be.
It is not a bad book. Some interesting people and companies covered, some insights derived that where new to me and all in all a fun read. Just not as deep as I expected
December 31, 2025
Overall quite a good book, rather well written especially it's the author's 1st book. Learned quite a bit about various countries and their technological capabilities (some to my amusement and delightful surprise). Glad to have finally finished this to count it towards 2025 completion 😁
December 29, 2025
Twas interesting. Long story short - no one can compete with the US or China. Also made the UK seem better than we are, imagine it’s the same for other countries
January 8, 2026
Changed my mind about business books
January 12, 2026
For more than a decade, debates about innovation have been framed as a zero-sum contest between the United States and China. Who is winning the race for technological supremacy? Who will dominate AI, clean energy, manufacturing, and the platforms that shape everyday life? In The New Geographies of Innovation, Mehran Gul steps back from the noise of this rivalry and asks a more interesting question: not who is ahead, but why innovation takes root in some places and not in others—and why, despite vast political and cultural differences, the world’s innovation hubs increasingly look alike.
Gul’s answer is both reassuring and faintly unsettling. The United States, he argues, is not in decline. By almost any meaningful metric—capital formation, firm creation, research depth, and the sheer economic weight of its technology companies—the American innovation system remains unmatched. China’s rise is real and extraordinary, but it does not come at the expense of US dynamism. Innovation, in this telling, is not a finite resource that shifts from one nation to another; it is something that can expand in multiple places at once.
What has changed is the geography. Innovation is no longer the near-monopoly of Silicon Valley and a handful of American cities. A small group of countries—still a minority globally—has learned how to reliably produce new technologies, new firms, and new capabilities. Beyond this circle, most nations remain on the outside, aspiring to join but struggling to replicate the conditions that make innovation self-sustaining.
The heart of the book lies in its comparative case studies. Moving fluidly across the US, China, South Korea, Germany, Switzerland, Singapore, the UK, and Canada, Gul shows how different societies have arrived—often by very different routes—at surprisingly similar endpoints. Germany’s Mittelstand, Korea’s chaebols, China’s state-owned giants, and America’s venture-backed startups appear distinct on the surface. Yet when it comes to frontier technology, these differences fade. Everywhere, the same architecture emerges: state-backed research institutions on one side, venture capital and startups on the other, linked by talent flows, procurement, and informal networks.
This convergence is one of Gul’s most provocative observations. The global innovation system, she suggests, is not a battle between competing models but a contest over execution within a single dominant paradigm. Nearly every country now wants its own version of DARPA, its own startup ecosystem, its own national champions. Even the culture of innovation—the language, aesthetics, and norms of behaviour—travels remarkably well, producing tech communities that feel uncannily similar whether they are in California, Seoul, or Singapore.
What makes this convergence unsettling is how little serious experimentation it leaves room for. Gul notes, almost in passing, the few moments when alternative visions surfaced: platforms imagined as public utilities rather than profit-maximising firms, AI labs flirting with public-interest governance, social networks conceived as protocols instead of companies. These ideas, however, tend to collapse back into the familiar gravity of venture-backed capitalism. The system absorbs dissent more easily than it transforms itself.
Where the book becomes especially compelling is in its treatment of culture. Institutional explanations—education systems, research funding, regulatory frameworks—matter enormously, but Gul is clear-eyed about their limits. Similar systems can produce radically different outcomes. The difference, she argues, lies in social attitudes toward risk, failure, ambition, and authority. Some societies generate dense networks of people willing to challenge norms, take bets on the future, and tolerate repeated failure. Others do not. Innovation, in this sense, is as much a cultural phenomenon as an economic one.
The book ends not with a policy prescription but with a deeper reflection: technologies are shaped by the societies that produce them. They are not neutral tools that emerge independently of culture and politics, but expressions of underlying social forces. Innovation “oozes” out of its environment, carrying with it the values, assumptions, and power structures of the places where it is born.
The New Geographies of Innovation succeeds because it resists easy triumphalism. It neither celebrates Silicon Valley uncritically nor treats China’s rise as destiny. Instead, it offers a sober, comparative account of how innovation actually works in the real world—and why replicating it is far harder than copying its surface features.
If the book leaves the reader with an unresolved tension, it is this: at a moment when technology shapes almost every aspect of society, the world seems to be converging on a single way of producing it. Whether that sameness represents stability, stagnation, or merely a transitional phase is a question Gul leaves deliberately open—and one that feels increasingly urgent.
Gul’s answer is both reassuring and faintly unsettling. The United States, he argues, is not in decline. By almost any meaningful metric—capital formation, firm creation, research depth, and the sheer economic weight of its technology companies—the American innovation system remains unmatched. China’s rise is real and extraordinary, but it does not come at the expense of US dynamism. Innovation, in this telling, is not a finite resource that shifts from one nation to another; it is something that can expand in multiple places at once.
What has changed is the geography. Innovation is no longer the near-monopoly of Silicon Valley and a handful of American cities. A small group of countries—still a minority globally—has learned how to reliably produce new technologies, new firms, and new capabilities. Beyond this circle, most nations remain on the outside, aspiring to join but struggling to replicate the conditions that make innovation self-sustaining.
The heart of the book lies in its comparative case studies. Moving fluidly across the US, China, South Korea, Germany, Switzerland, Singapore, the UK, and Canada, Gul shows how different societies have arrived—often by very different routes—at surprisingly similar endpoints. Germany’s Mittelstand, Korea’s chaebols, China’s state-owned giants, and America’s venture-backed startups appear distinct on the surface. Yet when it comes to frontier technology, these differences fade. Everywhere, the same architecture emerges: state-backed research institutions on one side, venture capital and startups on the other, linked by talent flows, procurement, and informal networks.
This convergence is one of Gul’s most provocative observations. The global innovation system, she suggests, is not a battle between competing models but a contest over execution within a single dominant paradigm. Nearly every country now wants its own version of DARPA, its own startup ecosystem, its own national champions. Even the culture of innovation—the language, aesthetics, and norms of behaviour—travels remarkably well, producing tech communities that feel uncannily similar whether they are in California, Seoul, or Singapore.
What makes this convergence unsettling is how little serious experimentation it leaves room for. Gul notes, almost in passing, the few moments when alternative visions surfaced: platforms imagined as public utilities rather than profit-maximising firms, AI labs flirting with public-interest governance, social networks conceived as protocols instead of companies. These ideas, however, tend to collapse back into the familiar gravity of venture-backed capitalism. The system absorbs dissent more easily than it transforms itself.
Where the book becomes especially compelling is in its treatment of culture. Institutional explanations—education systems, research funding, regulatory frameworks—matter enormously, but Gul is clear-eyed about their limits. Similar systems can produce radically different outcomes. The difference, she argues, lies in social attitudes toward risk, failure, ambition, and authority. Some societies generate dense networks of people willing to challenge norms, take bets on the future, and tolerate repeated failure. Others do not. Innovation, in this sense, is as much a cultural phenomenon as an economic one.
The book ends not with a policy prescription but with a deeper reflection: technologies are shaped by the societies that produce them. They are not neutral tools that emerge independently of culture and politics, but expressions of underlying social forces. Innovation “oozes” out of its environment, carrying with it the values, assumptions, and power structures of the places where it is born.
The New Geographies of Innovation succeeds because it resists easy triumphalism. It neither celebrates Silicon Valley uncritically nor treats China’s rise as destiny. Instead, it offers a sober, comparative account of how innovation actually works in the real world—and why replicating it is far harder than copying its surface features.
If the book leaves the reader with an unresolved tension, it is this: at a moment when technology shapes almost every aspect of society, the world seems to be converging on a single way of producing it. Whether that sameness represents stability, stagnation, or merely a transitional phase is a question Gul leaves deliberately open—and one that feels increasingly urgent.
October 13, 2025
This could have been a very good book. My main issue with it is that it remains at the surface of things, and even falls into preconceptions regarding the countries described.
Overall, this was a very North American perspective. I learned some things about China and Singapore and the Silicon Valley. But after reading the parts about Switzerland and Germany, countries that I know, I wonder how much of it was just cliché wrapped in academic names dropping.
There are some points I agree about, regarding innovation:
* infrastructure is important. You cannot build a successful, world class industry if you do not have good roads, reliable internet, low corruption etc.
* education counts as much as attracting specialized and experienced foreign talent, and the US higher education system is pricing out a growing % of people
* to succeed in business, you need people willing to take risks and work hard, but you also need access to funding (and the 2nd point is a major issue in Europe)
* academia and the private sector can successfully partner with industry to play the long game in innovation
Now the things that brother me:
* misunderstanding of the German economy and business landscape. Germany works because of a tight network of small to medium sized companies... Not everything is about big tech and big companies. Most German successful companies do not want to grow past a certain stage. Their shareholders do not chase exponential growth. This explains a lot about the German tech ecosystem.
* demographics is a powerful force that just cannot be ignored, even if immigration brings talented people in (if you are attracting and retaining them). Germany is paying a high price for low birth rates for decades. The innovators and business people etc, they were not stunted by an unsupportive funding environment. They were just never born.
* since the book opens on the Nordic gaming ecosystem, and I work in it, you cannot ignore the influence and impact of the demoscene. Now almost defunct, the demoscene grew and connected gaming talent in Northern Europe for a good 30 years. It was competitive, but also supportive. It connected people, who kept running into each other at game jams, LAN parties, on Usenet and then IRC. This type of environment is rocket fuel for technical growth. It also relies on people having free time, especially as students.
* the part about Switzerland was full of preconceptions, even if I agree with the parts about trains. Switzerland is very innovative in the financial sector. A lot of countries are innovative, just not in tech.
* Denmark is actually pretty welcoming to foreigners, and relying on the hearsay of just one person to say otherwise is sad. I have been living in Denmark for 7 years. I am a permanent resident and pretty visibly a foreigner. Doing good, feeling great and I have Danish friends. Too many people complain they cannot integrate because they never make an effort to adapt to the country they move to (this applies to any country).
* Saudi Arabia is a major investor currently in high tech, and a powerful force. This has many impacts on the current geography of innovation, and the roadmap of middle to large scale tech companies. It was never talked about in the book.
3 stars then, because there are other books on that topic that could serve you better.
Thank you NetGalley, Mehran Gul and Avid Reader Press for the ARC.
Overall, this was a very North American perspective. I learned some things about China and Singapore and the Silicon Valley. But after reading the parts about Switzerland and Germany, countries that I know, I wonder how much of it was just cliché wrapped in academic names dropping.
There are some points I agree about, regarding innovation:
* infrastructure is important. You cannot build a successful, world class industry if you do not have good roads, reliable internet, low corruption etc.
* education counts as much as attracting specialized and experienced foreign talent, and the US higher education system is pricing out a growing % of people
* to succeed in business, you need people willing to take risks and work hard, but you also need access to funding (and the 2nd point is a major issue in Europe)
* academia and the private sector can successfully partner with industry to play the long game in innovation
Now the things that brother me:
* misunderstanding of the German economy and business landscape. Germany works because of a tight network of small to medium sized companies... Not everything is about big tech and big companies. Most German successful companies do not want to grow past a certain stage. Their shareholders do not chase exponential growth. This explains a lot about the German tech ecosystem.
* demographics is a powerful force that just cannot be ignored, even if immigration brings talented people in (if you are attracting and retaining them). Germany is paying a high price for low birth rates for decades. The innovators and business people etc, they were not stunted by an unsupportive funding environment. They were just never born.
* since the book opens on the Nordic gaming ecosystem, and I work in it, you cannot ignore the influence and impact of the demoscene. Now almost defunct, the demoscene grew and connected gaming talent in Northern Europe for a good 30 years. It was competitive, but also supportive. It connected people, who kept running into each other at game jams, LAN parties, on Usenet and then IRC. This type of environment is rocket fuel for technical growth. It also relies on people having free time, especially as students.
* the part about Switzerland was full of preconceptions, even if I agree with the parts about trains. Switzerland is very innovative in the financial sector. A lot of countries are innovative, just not in tech.
* Denmark is actually pretty welcoming to foreigners, and relying on the hearsay of just one person to say otherwise is sad. I have been living in Denmark for 7 years. I am a permanent resident and pretty visibly a foreigner. Doing good, feeling great and I have Danish friends. Too many people complain they cannot integrate because they never make an effort to adapt to the country they move to (this applies to any country).
* Saudi Arabia is a major investor currently in high tech, and a powerful force. This has many impacts on the current geography of innovation, and the roadmap of middle to large scale tech companies. It was never talked about in the book.
3 stars then, because there are other books on that topic that could serve you better.
Thank you NetGalley, Mehran Gul and Avid Reader Press for the ARC.
November 11, 2025
A very nice book if you accept it for what it is. This is a piece of journalism, not an academic study. That means that the book will not provide indisputable proofs or final answers. The book gives an overview of 8 different countries' innovation systems, with the goal of understanding what makes some countries more innovative than others. Inevitably with such breadth, there is a risk of oversimplifying, but Gul does a good job of not overstating his case, and indeed the conclusion of the book is more of a question mark than an exclamation mark.
The strength of the book is the large number of first-hand interviews with influential founders, researchers and venture capitalists across all countries mentioned. While they do not have the answer either, reading the book does give you a glimpse into the mind of some people who think hard about what makes a successful tech ecosystem. The book also gives you mini biographies of different successful tech companies, which are well written and often entertaining to read. I'm happy that I read it, and I'll take it as one data point among many others when thinking about these topics going forward.
The strength of the book is the large number of first-hand interviews with influential founders, researchers and venture capitalists across all countries mentioned. While they do not have the answer either, reading the book does give you a glimpse into the mind of some people who think hard about what makes a successful tech ecosystem. The book also gives you mini biographies of different successful tech companies, which are well written and often entertaining to read. I'm happy that I read it, and I'll take it as one data point among many others when thinking about these topics going forward.
October 18, 2025
Exceptional but also incomplete -- I loved how deep the book goes into different countries and being familiar with the UK myself I could see that the author touched on all the headline topics that mattered even if everything couldn't be covered in as much detail as I would've liked. It's a deeply researched book and it shows especially when it comes to first person interviews, some of the top guys are in there -- Geoffrey Hinton, Kaifu Lee, John Hennessy to name a few. But I didn't quite understand why these countries were selected over others, it seemed really random. Why Canada and not, say, France? No country from Latin America or all of Africa which seemed like a glaring omission. So I thought the author did a good job of giving a comprehensive overview of each country in the space that was given but maybe left a few important countries out and included some that I was maybe not entirely convinced should have been in there. But a five star book overall and parts of it are very well-written.
October 16, 2025
You can get a lot of reading done on a 15 hour flight!!
This was book #2.
I was disappointed. As I am in the lounge preparing for my connecting flight, my comments will be brief. I had hoped for a more rigorous explanation of the comparative, underlying drivers of innovation across a wider range of advanced and emerging/developing economies. This was lacking. Most of the ink was devoted to a small cohort of major industrialized countries (including China in this cohort) and whilst this makes sense in terms of GDP, patents, market cap, etc., the delta of growth is shifting and a forward looking evaluation of the green shoots in the world outside the G-7 (or so) would have been interesting reading.
Spoiler alert………
News of the US’ fall from leadership is premature in the author’s view.
This was book #2.
I was disappointed. As I am in the lounge preparing for my connecting flight, my comments will be brief. I had hoped for a more rigorous explanation of the comparative, underlying drivers of innovation across a wider range of advanced and emerging/developing economies. This was lacking. Most of the ink was devoted to a small cohort of major industrialized countries (including China in this cohort) and whilst this makes sense in terms of GDP, patents, market cap, etc., the delta of growth is shifting and a forward looking evaluation of the green shoots in the world outside the G-7 (or so) would have been interesting reading.
Spoiler alert………
News of the US’ fall from leadership is premature in the author’s view.
November 22, 2025
This book was interesting and informative, more journalistic than academic. It shows the shifts that have happened in the geography of innovation and shows how various countries have nurtured or interfered with innovation.It discusses of course the US and Silicon Valley as well as China as well as a number of other countries such as Sweden, Germany, Switzerland, Singapore and Canada. Strangely enough India is not included in the countries being discussed. While not providing a theory on the success factors of innovation and not covering some future contenders such as India, it is worth reading as a journalistic review.
January 13, 2026
The author seems to believe America is currently in the ascendency but with China gaining with great strides in education and tech innovation. America has been the place the most talented want to come but with our administration threatening the H1B visas, will that remain the case? Will Europe start financially supporting its own tech? Thanks to Edelweiss and the publisher. Release date January 20. Prepare yourself. This was quite intense.
September 10, 2025
A five-star book with the author looking at innovation outside of the US in regions like Canada, S Korea, China, Switzerland, Sweden, Germany, Singapore and UK. Fascinating insight into some of the companies from these regions and well researched and written. Highly recommended.
September 14, 2025
An excellent account of the competition for technology supremacy, primarily between China and the US. The book also delves into the success of Samsung, Germany, Switzerland, and the big tech companies.
August 19, 2025
It’s fantastic. I only wish there had also been a chapter on India or Indian immigrants. Perhaps we are still inconsequential in the larger scheme of things, a much-needed reality check for the majority of Indians.
September 8, 2025
Real good book after a long time.
Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews