Can You Replicate a Culture of Innovation?
What exactly is a culture of innovation? Can its essence be bottled and sprinkled on companies to help them steal a march on their competitors? Or as The Atlantic magazine ponders, can you replicate the ethos, values and behaviors of Silicon Valley, one of the most innovative places on the planet?
In seeking out the answers, the publication featured extracts of a conversation between a historian and a librarian, held at The Atlantic’s Silicon Valley summit.
Taking part were Leslie Berlin, the Silicon Valley archivist at Stanford and Marina Gorbis, the executive director of the Institute for the Future.
Here are some of the key qualities of a culture of innovation highlighted by the pair.
Leslie Berlin
“There’s a real sense here that speed matters—it’s a sense of innovating on the fly.”
“There’s a constant influx of new people. Look at the Valley just as a population: A third of people living here now were born in other countries, two-thirds of the people in the tech sector were born in other countries.”
“For other places trying to replicate the Valley—this was just the result of a very specific set of circumstances. There’s more than one way to have an innovation economy.”
Marina Gorbis
Innovation isn’t just limited to the workplace. “These conversations happen at the playground, at school, in the supermarkets. We have stories and narratives that shape how we think about ourselves and our role in this—there’s a narrative about Silicon Valley as an innovation place.”
There is a socially conscious ethos. “These conversations are not just about technology. This is the notion that these are not just products, these are not just apps—people are changing the world.”
To read the full feature, click here.
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