America's Silicon Valley is the cradle and sacred ground of innovative companies worldwide. The headquarters of firms leading global technological innovation — Apple, Nvidia, Google, Meta and OpenAI — are clustered in Silicon Valley. Recently, however, voices are growing louder that Silicon Valley's monopoly position is being shaken. The most formidable challenger is China. Chinese companies are leading global markets in cutting-edge industries such as electric vehicles, batteries and drones.
China is not the only competitor to American innovators. In semiconductors, for example, Korea's Samsung Electronics and SK hynix, Taiwan's TSMC, Britain's Arm and the Netherlands' ASML each occupy unrivaled positions in their respective fields.
Could the era of American technological hegemony come to an end, with China or another country emerging as a new hub of innovation? The new book "The Geography of Innovation" begins with precisely this question, which has captured the attention of the global tech community. The author, who has worked as an industrial policy expert at the World Economic Forum (WEF) and the United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO), dissects the technological capabilities and potential of eight countries leading global innovation in search of an answer.
After directly interviewing more than 200 entrepreneurs, government officials and investors from each country, the author reaches a clear conclusion: Silicon Valley's dominance will not be shaken anytime soon. The reasoning is that the world is moving from the ".com" era to the ".ai" era, and Silicon Valley sits at the center of that shift. Indeed, the world's most influential artificial intelligence (AI) companies — OpenAI, Anthropic and Databricks — are all located within a 3-kilometer radius of San Francisco. The author also points to Silicon Valley's open culture and deep talent pool as factors that will keep China at bay. In Silicon Valley, employees move freely between companies, sharing knowledge and experience and forming powerful technological combinations. Furthermore, the author argues, while China selects talent from 1 billion people within its borders, the United States selects talent from 8 billion people worldwide.
China's stature, of course, has also changed. The author judges that China is effectively America's only competitor today. Once a country that imitated American technology, China has now overtaken the United States to become the nation contributing the most papers to the world's most prestigious academic journals. According to the Leiden Ranking, which scores institutions by research output, six of the world's top 10 universities are Chinese. China's adoption of electric vehicles, industrial robots, mobile payments and solar power generation exceeds the combined adoption of all other regions of the world. But the greatest risk facing Chinese tech companies is government regulation and interference. A representative example is the Chinese government's scuttling in 2020 of the initial public offering (IPO) of Ant Group, which had been valued at approximately $300 billion (about 410 trillion won).
Canada's case — having become an AI power through aggressive immigration policy — is also worth noting. Geoffrey Hinton of the University of Toronto, Yoshua Bengio of the University of Montreal and Richard Sutton of the University of Alberta, who today are regarded as the foremost scholars in AI, are all first-generation immigrants to Canada. Canada has established AI research institutes near the universities where these scientists are based and is strategically nurturing the AI industry.
The author also describes the evolution of Korean tech companies in three stages. The first stage consists of traditional conglomerates such as Samsung and Hyundai. The second stage comprises internet platform companies such as Naver and Kakao. Third-stage tech companies — including Coupang, Krafton, Sendbird, Twelve Labs and Moloco — share the common traits of having secured technological advantages over foreign competitors and having entered both the U.S. and Korean markets. In the foreword to the Korean edition, the author particularly emphasizes that Korean companies represent a direct rebuttal to "The Innovator's Dilemma" — the idea that established conglomerates are pushed aside and rendered obsolete by upstarts wielding disruptive technologies. A representative example is Samsung Electronics, which began as a small trading company during the Japanese colonial period and now leads the global semiconductor and mobile phone markets.
The message running through the book is that "where you start a company still matters." In an interview with the author, Sendbird CEO John Kim said he was treated as a misfit in Korea but felt a sense of belonging the moment he arrived in Silicon Valley. "At every café I went to, I could see startup CEOs eagerly pitching to venture capitalists, and the people around me were uniformly talking about technology. … It felt as if I had found my home."
The book persuasively shows that what matters in the age of innovation is not a single genius, but the "soil" in which innovation can grow. 464 pages, 21,500 won.
