Silicon Valley's Disruption Deficit Disorder - Umair Haque

Absolute must-read from Haque as to why Silicon Valley is fading:

Quick: what would you call a business whose apathetic, listless — and sometimes irate — customers are starting to walk away, whose former blockbuster is becoming today’s lower and lower margin snoozer, whose most promising firebrands would rather eat a pound of plutonium than obey the conventional wisdom, and whose future is openly questioned by its own tribal elders? I’d call it a business for whom the bell of crisis is tolling the zero hour. Welcome to Silicon Valley — that intersection of venture capital, start-ups, markets, and IPOs — in the 21st century. Today, America — and the world’s — great engine of innovation has got Disruption Deficit Disorder.

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So here’s my impertinent, and perhaps gigantically thick-headed, suggestion: maybe, just maybe: Silicon Valley should be the crucible of 21st century capitalism instead of the last bastion of 20th century capitalism.

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What the Valley might just need, I believe, isn’t a host of new technologies. It first needs a host of new institutions, updated for 21st century economics (like those I wrote about last week). Silicon Valley and Silicon Alley are currently clusters of technological innovation — but what they might just have to become in the 21st century is clusters of innovation for our basic, fundamental economic institutions instead.

Amazingly radical, countercyclical thinking: we don’t need to get back to doing business the way we did prior to the econolypse: we need an entirely different notion of ‘business’ to break out of the ruts of 20th century industrial dogma.