Category Archives: Innovation

What Is Innovation?

So what is innovation? I had already addressed the question in 2015 in Invention, Entrepreneurship and Innovation. My colleague Federico gave me a few days ago another definition of Innovation from MIT’s Bill Aulet.

Innovation = Invention ∗ Commercialization

You will find the video here.

And here some extracts:

So could it have been “Innovation equals invention?” No, often people mistake these two things for the same thing. They are not. Innovation is something that generates value for the world. It makes something faster, better, cheaper. It gives someone some great satisfaction. An invention is an idea, a technology, a patent. In and of itself, it does not generate value. So these two are not the same thing. And sometimes you see them interchange. And that’s not correct.

So innovation equals invention times commercialization. And when we look at this equation of innovation, something of value, it requires a new idea. And then, it requires someone or some organization that is going to commercialize that idea and to make it a value to the world. So it’s important to understand that an idea by itself is not valuable. Ideas are cheap. Is the commercialization when combined with it that makes them extraordinarily valuable. So while sometimes when I used to say invention plus commercialization, in fact, it’s times.

It’s a product because if I don’t have one, then it’s zero. Then, I have no innovation. If I have no new idea, I can’t commercialize anything. Therefore, it’s zero. If I have an invention and no commercialization, I have no innovation as well. So it’s actually a product. It’s, in fact, the commercialization aspect of it that’s very, very difficult.

If you look at the most innovative company in the world today, which I would argue is Apple, the underlying inventions that created Apple, great innovations starting with the Mac, did not come from themselves. It actually came from Xerox PARC. It was windows, icon, mouse, pointer. That invention, they commercialized to create innovation, which created terrific value in the marketplace and for their customers and for themselves, their investors as well. Likewise after that, you look again that the invention for the underlying and enabling idea, technology from the iPod was MP3, which did not come from Apple, again. That came from Fraunhofer. But what Apple was terrific at was commercialization to create innovation and, again, to create great value for their customers and their shareholders. So this definition of innovation we found very, very helpful to make clear that innovation is a combination of a new idea, a new technology. But then, it has to be commercialized and mapped to some customer in the real world where it will generate value.

Thanks Federico 🙂

XXIst Century Utopias according to Libero Zuppiroli

In his latest book, Les utopies du XXIe siècle (The Utopias of the 21st Century) Libero Zuppiroli makes an original presentation of what I call the excessive promises of innovation. I wrote recently a short chronicle about it in Enterprise Romande and Bernard Stiegler makes a much more pessimistic analysis in In the disruption – How not to go crazy? A third very interesting reference is the collective work Emerging Science and Technologies, why so many promises?

Libero Zuppiroli tackles the issue from the perspective of utopias and dystopias, using in the beginning of his book ancient authors of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, that show that excessive optimism has always existed and that its realistic, even pessimistic, counterpart has also always accompanied it. Flora Tristan in 1840 mirrors Sadi Carnot’s benefits of the machine in 1824, Marat in 1774 is paralleled to Adam Smith’s economic liberalism in 1776, and Francis Bacon, in 1627, dreamed of never ending scientific and technological progress. The utopian promises are not new!

It is a book that must be read and I will let you discover the analyses of the promises in the fields of information technology, robotics, defense, 3D printers and nanotechnologies, the city and energy, health, and big data. A simple illustration: around 2005, nanotechnologies were seen as an extremely promising market, which would reach 3’000 billion dollars in 10 years. More than 10 years later, the market is around $100 millions…

I fear, however, that Libero Zuppiroli does not have much illusions about the impact of his analyzes. In a note on critical authors (note 119, page 293), he writes, “He is one of these famous intellectual critics whom American society not only tolerates, but also encouraged the birth of. Their critic of the American system is harsh and based on remarkable analyzes, but those who possess the power know that, despite their international reputation, the audience of these intellectuals is limited to a small fraction of people already convinced. Whatever their talent, their influence on the masses of electors will always be much lower than that of teleevangelists.”

But I knew Libero Zuppiroli was playful and his conclusion confirms this to me: this Empire will collapse as previously collapsed the Roman, Napoleonic and Soviet Empires. When? Nobody knows … but it will collapse victim of its Hubris

PS (October 29, 2018): the reader may also be interested in another blog contribution: Dissecting the utopias of the 21st century by Diane Golay.

Virtual Innovations?

I had not contributed to Entreprise Romande for a while, which might be the reason of my somehow tiredness about the never ending flow of (virtual?) innovations. Here is my translation of my latest contribution…

When the editor of your favorite magazine asked me for a new contribution about innovation, offering me to write about bitcoin, artificial intelligence, data protection, GAFAs or China, I was the victim if not of a slight dizziness, at least of a certain weariness. I just had to add to this list Fake news, Trips to Mars or Replacement of Humans by Machines and my ongoing passion for startups and technological innovation turned into a light nightmare. It seems to me that the more we talk about innovation and the less we really innovate.

When I explain my slight skepticism to anybody, they usually start with the mention of replacing the cashier of the Migros (a “famous” chain of Swiss supermarkets) with a machine. I reply that it seems to me that we, buyers, have replaced the cashier. If the media relayed in 2011 Foxconn’s announcement that it wanted to install a million robots in 3 years, threatening the 1.2 million employees, an online search indicates today that it has a ability to install 10,000 robots a year, and still the same number of employees.

Silicon Valley, having been at the origin of the major innovations of the last fifty years, is scrutinized more attentively. Of course the GAFAs represent a real threat: the two A become the supermarket of the world while the G and F support them by advertisements based on data that we have kindly given them, putting them in a quasi-monopoly situation. But you read well, supermarket, advertising. And that is what is called major innovations?

And what about globalized venture capital? Softbank has announced the launch of a 100 billion fund, by far the largest ever. In the last two months, 10 internet startups (including Dropbox and Spotify) have announced their intention to go public. The figures are dizzying: they generated 10 billion in revenues and 2 billion losses in 2017, thanks to 4 billion of funds raised since their creation. Venture capital has become an infernal machine that, like China and the GAFAs, seems unstoppable. But the venture capital that financed in 1976 Genentech and Apple with a few millions today massively funds the “uberisation” of the world, new global supermarket, and less and less the “deeptech”. I see in these trends an accelerated globalization but few major innovations.

When I think of the innovations of tomorrow, I think of nuclear fusion that will solve our energy problems, research on AIDS or cancer that will rid us of these disasters as we have been able to get rid of previous diseases, I think of disruptive solutions for water, food, mobility. Tom Perkins, Silicon Valley’s big venture capitalist, thought that the innovations of our time were based on three major inventions, the steam engine, the electricity and especially the transistor that made possible all the technologies that seem to threaten us today. But where is the next invention? I recognize myself in Peter Thiel’s phrase: “We wanted flying cars; instead, we had 140 characters. ”

Do not get me wrong, the innovation flow was exceptional in the 20th century and developments continue. In biotechnology, the Crispr-CAS9 technology [1] is as promising as the genetic revolution of the 1970s. Three startups, Crispr Therapeutics, Intellia Therapeutics and Editas Medicine went public in 2016 and promise to cure 10,000 diseases. But today these three companies represent less than $70 million in revenue and more than 200 million in losses in 2017. We do not yet have gene therapy or personalized medicine. Google’s Alphago beat the best go player, but nasty voices ​​say that it’s only the largest computing power and the largest data storage of computers that has allowed such performance, and no particular invention or intelligence . In more complex contexts, the machine is not able to compete with humans. And what will really bring us the multiplication of Big Data? But the promises of some to politicians and others to their shareholders, amplified by the media, are sometimes an insult to intelligence: why parasitize the human spirit with promises of (virtual) innovations sometimes more “abracadabrantesque” one than the others and ultimately disappointing when the real world is sufficiently complex and exciting?

[1] https://www.investors.com/news/technology/crispr-gene-editing-biotech-companies/

March 8 – International Women’s Day

About to give my optimization class this morning, I just remembered only one woman got the Fields Medal. This was in 2014. Unfortunately she died of cancer last year

Maryam Mirzakhani (3 May 1977 – 14 July 2017) became the first Iranian and first and only woman to win the Fields Medal.

Let me add, that in the field of optimization, apparently only one woman got the Dantzig Prize, Eva Tardos.

I have to admit, I did not take the time to think of a similar name for startups and innovation. Comments welcome…

Google is not Stanford largest license revenue anymore

Until early this morning, I thought that the Google license (i.e. the rights Stanford University had granted the startup on the PageRank patent) was the largest generator of licensing revenue for the Californian university. I was wrong! If you read the annual reports of OTL, its Office of Technology Licensing, for example the pdf of the 2016 Annual Report, you may notice that the largest royalty revenue generator had another source: intellectual property/patents about functional monoclonal antibodies. Here are what these reports say of the largest amount of revenue in a given year from a single invention:
2016: $64M
2015: $62.77M
2014: $60.53M
2013: $55M
2012: $51M
2011: $44M
2010: $45M
2009: $38M
2008: $37M
2007: $33.5M
2006: $29M
These numbers give a total of $363M and another book mentions $125M cumulatively before 2006. But a more recent powerpoint document shows that the total cumulative revenue is … $613M!!

As a side note, in 2005, the Google patent gave proceeds of $336M following the company IPO. The 2004 and 2003 reports do not say the amount of the largest source of income whereas in 2002, it was “an unexpected $5.8M in one-time royalties” and in 2001, “for the first time in over 20 years, a physical science invention – an optical fiber amplifier – generated the most income”.

As Lita Nelsen from MIT said (see my previous post), “Even nationwide, you can show that tech transfer is, at best, a lottery if you want to make an ability to influence [a university’s financial position]. The primary winners—not 100 percent of them, but damn close—are single pharmaceuticals. Because if a pharmaceutical hits the market, it’s going to be in the multi-billon dollar [range]. The equity is seldom worth a lot, unless of course you can follow up with preferred investments. But that’s not what we’re in the business of doing. Any university that counts on its tech transfer to make a significant change in its finances is statistically going to be in trouble.” Google was a big exception with the equity proceeeds whereas the patent around monoclonal antibodies or the Cohen Boyer patent are about pharma. Have a look at the next figure from the same powerpoint document.

Interestingly enough I am reading a very interesting book (more when I am finished) which describes the early days of Silicon Valley and in particular the creation of the office of Technology Licensing by Niels Rimers.

In Troublemakers, author Leslie Berlin extensively describes the Cohen Boyer patent. In note 32 (page 450), she describes the terms of the Cohen-Boyer license. You can also find them in Lessons from the Commercialization of the Cohen-Boyer Patents: The Stanford University Licensing Program.

73 companies has signed for the initial $10k upfront payment, but “ten companies alone provided 77% (US$197 million) of the total licensing income” and 3 (Amgen, Genentech and Lily) provided close to 50% of the total. All this is well-known but I thought it would be interesting to blog about it today.

MIT’s Lita Nelsen Perspective on Academic Technology Transfer

I just read an excellent interview of Lita Nelsen who has recently retired as head of MIT’s Technology Licensing Office. You should read the full Exit Interview: Lita Nelsen on MIT Tech Transfer, Startups & Culture. I was used to say that MIT was more conservative than Stanford just like the Boston Area has been known to be more conservtaive than California, but things change. So let me just mention a few extracts.


Lita Nelsen (Formerly head of MIT Technology Licensing Office)

About patents:

Patents are needed because the whole idea is if you’re going to get somebody to invest a lot of time and a lot of money, if you succeed you don’t want the other guy, the bigger guy, saying, “Well, thank you very much. Now that you’ve shown the way, get out of the way.” We are primarily using patents as an incentive for investment.

About universities having an investment fund:

[The Technology Licensing Office helps] start about 25 or 30 companies a year. God knows how many [other companies started on campus] go out the back door. No one fund could put that amount of sweat equity into all of them. Now imagine we have MIT’s fund, and I invest in company A, but don’t have the resources to do B, or maybe not C. Then I go with C to [an outside venture capital firm] and say, “How would you like my leftovers?” There’s a negative selection bias there for what we don’t invest in. So, better to let a level playing field for anybody who wants to play.

But one thing any institution doing it has to decide is, are we primarily in it for return on investment? Or are we primarily in it for getting companies started that wouldn’t otherwise get started? You usually get a mixed message if you ask people which it is. And as everybody knows, when you get mixed missions, things get very hard to manage.

About equity in licensing:

How much equity does the Technology Licensing Office usually take when it spins out a company? Usually in the lower single digits, maybe a little higher if you have a software spinout. And it’s common shares.

If it’s research-intensive stuff—biotech, things that take multiple rounds of funding—[our stake] usually gets demoted down to [tiny] portions. You make a little money; you don’t make a lot. Except in cases when the Wall Street bubble is totally irrational. Even nationwide, you can show that tech transfer is, at best, a lottery if you want to make an ability to influence [a university’s financial position]. The primary winners—not 100 percent of them, but damn close—are single pharmaceuticals. Because if a pharmaceutical hits the market, it’s going to be in the multi-billon dollar [range]. The equity is seldom worth a lot, unless of course you can follow up with preferred investments. But that’s not what we’re in the business of doing. Any university that counts on its tech transfer to make a significant change in its finances is statistically going to be in trouble.

About accelerators:

“Does MIT have an incubator?” And my classic answer has been, “Yes, it’s called the city of Cambridge.”

The problem with accelerators is the definition has become as broad and varied as incubators, which range from science parks to little projects within universities, so you don’t know what the word means until you dig in. But some of them are putting money into product development. Some of them are venture funds expecting ROI. Some of them are [funded] through donations, as we did with Deshpande and Harvard did with their accelerator.
It’s going to be interesting to look at the mechanisms that people are trying. Because the problem is there: How do we get from the stage of which the university has done its research and maybe even gotten on the cover of Science magazine, to where somebody is going to invest in that ripening process before it actually turns into true product development, short-term product development? How do you get from the petri dish to full-scale clinical trials? You’ve got to get pretty far along before pharma’s going to do that for you. So people are looking both within universities and outside of universities as to how you fill the gap.

About teaching entrepreneurship:

now MIT, with its emphasis on innovation, is investing officially in training students in innovation and entrepreneurship, along with, not separate from, their intense technical educations. It’s not “you go and learn how to be an entrepreneur,” it’s you learn biology or chemistry or electrical engineering or computer science, but you also learn how entrepreneurship and innovation and moving technology out into the marketplace works—rather than having to learn that after you graduate.

The Tinkerings of Robert Noyce – again

I read again The Tinkerings of Robert Noyce for reasons which are not directly related to Silicon Valley or Start-ups. A few days ago, I blogged about an extremely good article from the New Yorker – Our Town by Larissa MacFarquhar. The author illustrates some universal values of humankind through a small community in Iowa. And this reminded me of Tom Wolfe article written for Esquire Magazine in 1983. I found it again online here. It begins with : “In 1948 there were seven thousand people in Grinnell, Iowa, including more than one who didn’t dare take a drink in his own house without pulling the shades down first.” Robert Noyce studied at Grinnell College then left to MIT then to what would become Silicon Valley. Grinnell College was quite advanced in electronics. Tom Wolfe claims: “But MIT had proved to be a backwater… when it came to the most advanced form of engineering, solid-state electronics. Grinnell College, with its one thousand students, had been years ahead of MIT.” And later Grinnell College would invest in Intel, making its endowment unusually successful.

I was about to blog here about Wolfe’s article and (re)discovered, shame on me, that I had blogged about it in 2012! I had mentioneed the piece about the Wagon Wheel bar. Here it is again.

Or else he would leave the plant and decide, well, maybe he would drop in at the Wagon Wheel for a drink before he went home. Every year there was some place, the Wagon Wheel, Chez Yvonne, Rickey’s, the Roundhouse, where members of this esoteric fraternity, the young men and women of the semiconductor industry, would head after work to have a drink and gossip and brag and trade war stories about phase jitters, phantom circuits, bubble memories, pulse trains, bounceless contacts, burst modes, leapfrog tests, p-n junctions, sleeping-sickness modes, slow-death episodes, RAMs, NAKs, MOSes, PCMs, PROMs, PROM blowers, PROM burners, PROM blasters, and teramagnitudes, meaning multiples of a million millions. So then he wouldn’t get home until nine, and the baby was asleep, and dinner was cold, and the wife was frosted off, and he would stand there and cup his hands as if making an imaginary snowball and try to explain to her… while his mind trailed off to other matters, LSIs, VLSIs, alpha flux, de-rezzing, forward biases, parasitic signals, and that terasexy little cookie from Signetics he had met at the Wagon Wheel, who understood such things.

Here is another piece about stock options, which I discussed in another recent post: Rewarding Talent – A guide to stock options for European entrepreneurs by Index Ventures.

From the beginning Noyce gave all the engineers and most of the office workers stock options. He had learned at Fairchild that in a business so dependent upon research, stock options were a more powerful incentive than profit sharing. People sharing profits naturally wanted to concentrate on products that were already profitable rather than plunge into avant-garde research that would not pay off in the short run even if it were successful. But people with stock options lived for research breakthroughs. The news would send a semiconductor company’s stock up immediately, regardless of profits.

There would be so much more to say about this marvelous piece of Silicon Valley and American history. You should read it!

The complexity of innovation policies – the example of Malaysia

I was lucky to meet last week two economists from the International Monetary Fund who are the authors of the working paper The Leap of the Tiger: How Malaysia Can Escape the Middle-Income Trap. It is not directly linked to high-tech innovation and I am not an economist; my expertise is limied to the nano-economics of start-ups. This being said, I was very impressed by the analysis of Reda Cherif and Fuad Hasanov.

In general, I read more about developed countries and high-tech entrepreneurship, Silicon Valley, obviously, but also the example of Israel, Finland, France, Chile… Lerner, Saxenian and Mazzucato have been important authors for me. Hasanov and Cherif explain how Malaysia tried to develop its economy and relatively failed compared to Taiwan and Korea. The reasons are complex and the interested person should read their paper.

They really show the complexity of things and again the recipe needs so much fine tuning, with no guarantee of success. The addition of Chile, Thailand and Norway in their analysis, makes it really rich. I understood that a combination of strong state support (incentives, funding, sometimes protection) and competition in the private sector (so many Korean automotive firms were initially created) with an emphasis on its ability to export is very striking. Why did Nokia succeeded for some time and not Alcatel maybe explained with their arguments. They also put a lot of emphasis in the ability to innovate, a must to enable exportations.

So Mazzucato is right, the state has an entrepreneurial role, but individual initiatives seem to be also important, something I had not necessarily understood in the cased of Taiwan and Korea. The diaspora of engineers who studied and work abroad (in the USA mostly) was instrumental to the economic development and innovation once they came back (sometimes many years later) in their home country…

Politics vs. Economics: A country is not a Start-up

I publish more and more posts about politics, society and start-ups. I recently had one about sexism in Silicon Valley and the motivation for this one is a French blogger who critized French president, Emmanuel Macron, for his saying that France should become a startup nation. The author, Mehdi Medjaoui, reacted by writing Non, la France ne doit pas devenir une start-up (No, France must not become a start-up).

This is a very interesting article in French, so I put most of the content in Google Translate and though I did my best to correct this (decently good) tool, I am not sure what follows is easily readable. But the main messages should be possible to follow. It is worth the read. the author knows very well start-ups and Silicon Valley and he does not have (I think) really much against them, btu I agree with him, their unique model and dynaics cannot and should be copied by states, and indeed only by a tiny number of people or groups.

France is not a start-up, it already has its model

No, France is not a start-up, that is to say a temporary organization in search of a model of growth and income, as defined by Steve Blank, one of the pioneers to theorize the mentality start- Up in Silicon Valley. France is a multi-century nation, whose model of “freedom equality fraternity” is universal, universalist and resonant for eternity. She is no longer looking for a model. She has been in the execution of this model for 220 years.

No, France is not a start-up, owned by a small number of shareholders and unelected investment funds, authorized to make unilateral choices without counter-measures that are necessary for the whole group. France is a democratic, sovereign nation whose representatives are of the people, elected by the people, for the people and seeking the separation and balance of power in the interests of all these citizens.

France should not think like a start-up, it must put innovation at the service of progress

No, France should not think “make something people want”, as would say Paul Graham, the founder of the best-known start-up accelerator that is YCombinator. France is a Republic (res-publica, the public thing) which thinks the general interest over particular interests. We would still have the death penalty if we were content to accomplish only the things people wanted. France must think “make what the people want”. The people as a whole. Not a part of the people.

No France should not adopt the strategy of blitzscaling thought by Reid Hoffman – founder of LinkedIn and investor – that is to say to invest resources with very great loss, on a very risky profile, betting on the debt to take Dominant market positions. France must manage its public finances in good faith because it is fundamentally the money of the citizens, and it must invest in infrastructure for the future, less risky and less profitable in the short term. It is not for the French State to take risks, it is for entrepreneurs, who will be rewarded for this. Because yes, thinking like a start-up is thinking of extreme growth, at any price, in a leak forward that leads to failure in 90% of cases. But unlike a startup, if you miss, you cannot start France again.

No, France must not succumb to the dictatorship of innovation that prevails in Silicon Valley, which is beginning to innovate to innovate as long as there are people to invest in a bubble economy … As Peter Thiel would say in “Where is the Future”. “We wanted flying cars, we had networks of 140 characters instead.” France should not think and control itself like a game where one bursts of candy, or a social network of photos or micro-messaging.

“France, the 5th world power and nuclear power does not drive like CandyCrush, Tinder or Snapchat”

On the other hand, France must think Progress. With values from the Enlightenment, it must enlighten the world again by thinking about the future, and by putting innovation and start-ups at the service of this future, because “Innovation without conscience is only ruin of the soul”.

For example, France as a nation must think the future by its ethical scientific and industrial intellectuals, define qualitative and quantitative objectives for the future of humanity, encourage innovation in this direction, go out of the «spray and pray» which is to believe that we must water and support all innovations and pray to see those that will evolve in progress.

It can do this by piloting its public research towards these objectives, the steering of its policy of financing innovation through the Public Investment Bank and the Caisse des Depots et Consignations and an open policy of valorization by its Socities for the Accelerated Transfer of Technology (SATT). The state can also do so with the legal context of intellectual property to allow all entrepreneurs in the territory to have a free license on unused patents owned by the state.

It is perhaps even negotiating at the global level to renounce the patenting of living organisms or medicines for poorer countries, or clean energy, in a logic of progress for humanity against the logic of capital. Somewhat like Elon Musk did when he put Tesla’s patents in the public domain, or the YCombinator accelerator I mentioned earlier, which guarantees with its YCResearch research center that all the results from their Works will be in the public domain.

At the same time, France, unlike the start-up philosophy, has to direct the world to think about the crazy guards that innovation tries to circumvent pushed by its logic of short-term profit. For example, Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and researchers in the OpenAI movement want to finance the balance of knowledge in the field of artificial intelligence to ensure that it does not drift and becomes our last invention. It is the role of an enlightened nation like France to think these things on a global level. Not to think like a start-up to accept any innovation whatever its impact on the world, on the sole pretext that it is innovation, without knowing in which direction to go. For as the Chinese proverb says, “There is good wind only to him who knows where he is going”.

No France should not yield like start-ups to the galactic datacracy which thinks that one can control everything with metrics of acquisition, activation, retention, income and recommendations, statistics and the Big data. Or even succumb to what Eric Ries, the author of Lean Startup, calls the Vanity Metrics, these indicators of success that are not. That we can all automate, in a virtuous martingale this creation of value and unlimited. No, the data is only a representation of reality because it always suffers from statistical and collection bias. As Jacky Fayolle, administrator of INSEE, puts it: “When indicators are used in a fetish fashion, disconnected from the information system from which they come, they deplete public action rather than enrich it, while Offering an easy but illusory assessment of the performance of these actions.”
Cathy O’Neil in her book Weapons of Maths Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy takes on the example of the subprime crisis Where she explains that “a formula can be perfectly innocuous in theory. But when it is used on a large scale and becomes a national or global standard, it creates its own distorted and dystopic economy.” Behind, these are not application features that no longer work, they are people expropriated and put On the street, the financial bankruptcies of people who had invested their retirement in the markets and who have nothing more … and public money by hundreds of billions of all the citizens who come to bail out the banks.

On the scale of a start-up looking for its model, it is easy to go back in the real to understand what is not working and to publish a new version of the software two days later. When one speaks of basing the whole society behind the data, one takes the risk of diluting its meaning, which creates a systemic risk of discrepancy between reality and its statistical or algorithmic representation on a scale where one does not Can stop the machine.

No France should not act as a start-up, it must guarantee the long term

No, France should not “Move fast and break things”, that is to say to innovate at the risk of breaking the existing, as Mark Zuckerberg said in the first ten years of Facebook. France must guarantee national cohesion, guaranteeing progress for all, in the long term and without breaking the gains of social progress, its culture and its living together which are a legacy of the common French. Moreover once a critical size reached for Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg changed this principle to “Move fast with stable infrastructure”. This is closer to a sound strategy of rapid development by respecting the stability of what has already been built before, and which endorses the fact that Facebook was no longer a start-up. As France, too, must not think as such, it must also maintain the stability of its infrastructures, as quickly as it moves.

No, France does not have to “Fuck it, ship it”, an ideology that promotes the release of products not yet finished, to confront them with reality and learn from their impact on customers and the market. As Reid Hoffman (again) says, “If you’re not ashamed of your product when you take it out, it’s because you took too long to get it out and you’d have to get it out a lot sooner”.
France must think about reforms and laws in a spirit of respect for institutions, debate and consultation in the constitutional requirement and not produce laws or any other reform or infrastructure, without thinking about equality of rights. When you manage 67 million people in such an advanced way in your life, you cannot produce laws, utilities, infrastructure without thinking for all in the long run. You cannot do it without planning them on qualitative and quantitative goals of progress, egalitarian and ecological, just to get them out and see what it gives and then iterate. In other words: motorways or nuclear power plants are not built in “Fuck it ship it” mode.

No, France should not “Ask for forgiveness, not for permission”. The acts of the French state bind him before history. This can be seen, for example, in Germany, which still has no right to hold nuclear weapons or Japan which cannot devote more than 1% of its GDP to its army in retaliation for their actions during the second world War. It can also be seen with the consequences of colonization which remain open wounds in a large part of the population and a French dishonor in the History of the world. A start-up can make moral mistakes, play with the limits of the law like Uber and Airbnb to move the lines, but a state has many other responsibilities of another kind before international law and the course of the story. No France ought not to engage the nation for the future without thinking of the consequences.

France does not have to fail fast, fail often, but France is a nation state whose model has no right to break, in a country with 9 million poor people, 4 million poorly housed. Moreover, France cannot economically go bankrupt. The economic defeat, it ends in the end by “hyperinflation or war” as Karl Marx would say. Hyperinflation if we try to pay off the debts that have become un-repayable, the war with its creditors if we do not want to pay them back and they come to force it back.
And then we cannot start France again with another team and other investors. There is but one people of France, and one territory of France.

No France should not like a start-up segment its offers according to the citizens in a cleaving relationship, for citizens who can afford to subscribe and others not. On the contrary, it must treat the whole territory and all its citizens in an inclusive, “equal with equals, unequal with unequal” way, to compensate for differences of fact or nature, not to accentuate them.

No France should not invest everything solely on technological solutionism, which advocates that everything can be solved with an application, as Evgeny Morozov explains in his book “To save everything click here” or Jaron Lanier in his book “Who owns The Future.” Things are more complex than that when you run a nation. France must think, like Barack Obama in front of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, that “Democracy is by definition disordered and that if all I had to do was produce a widget (web or mobile application) without worrying about Whether the poorest can access it or worry about possible collateral damage, then the recommendations of the Silicon Valley bosses would be great.”

No, France should not create temporal monopolies, as Peter Thiel would say in his book Zero to One, in order to create more margin than its competitors (especially Europeans) in order to continue investing to maintain this monopoly. France needs to think of economic collaboration with its European partners, to rebuild a political Europe that goes beyond the doctrine of free and undistorted competition that puts countries in tax and social competition. France must establish itself in Europe in a logic of cooperation, as we have seen with the industrial successes of Airbus and Ariane Espace. There remain the economics of the sea, the digital and so many other areas on which to cooperate at the European level with our partners, not our competitors.

France must be an infrastructure, think and act as an infrastructure

Instead of being a start-up and thinking like a start-up, France must become an entrepreneurial state. In this context, its role is a regulator, an insurer of last resort and an arbitrator who ensures the freedom to undertake, reduces the opportunity cost and the cost of access to the market to its minimum for entrepreneurs , Helps finance innovation, supports basic research, while protecting its strategic industries. Its role is to ensure neutrality, equity, transparency and stability in the marketplace to create a climate of sound confidence and enable entrepreneurs to innovate. In this respect, it is concretely to create an infrastructure favorable to the creation of value, with maximum positive externalities to allow the emergence of a fertile ecosystem to the taking of risk. But it is not France that must take risks! Entrepreneurs will be more agile to identify market needs and build experiences that customers expect. The State is involved in investing in infrastructure over the long term and pooling them for all, with access costs tending to zero with the number, allowing the opportunity cost to the entrepreneurial Real equality of opportunity.
So it is not to think like a start-up but to think like an infrastructure that allows the emergence of startups, guaranteeing as a state the counterpart of the legislative framework in the direction of Progress over the long term for the society.

A State is the opposite of “move fast and break things”, but rather “move forward and do not break”

“We can not stop progress” or the dictatorship of innovation

“In the speech of Emmanuel Macron at Vivatech, the word innovation is pronounced 25 times, the word progress does not appear.”

As Etienne Klein has often said in his lectures, “50 years ago, for every innovation that brought society forward, it was said, We do not stop progress”. There was a benevolent vision of innovation where it was said that technology came to free men and women from their condition. In a society where innovation is king, this expression takes a whole different turn. “One does not stop progress” is today the expression of a dictatorship of innovation. Technology is seen as a bulimic monster that will come to threaten our future, take jobs, consume more resources, with no safeguards. It is the theories of the Singularity University in Mountain View, where it is believed that technology will replace the man in a “forced march” and make it obsolete.

Is this really our plan for the future?

“The idea of progress was a doubly consoling idea. In the first place, because by sustaining the hope of a future improvement of our living conditions, by making a more desirable world a long way off, it made history humanly bearable. Second, because it gave meaning to the sacrifices it imposed. In the name of a certain idea of the future, mankind was called upon to work for a progress which the individual would not necessarily Experience, but whose descendants could benefit. ”
In short, to believe in progress was to accept the sacrifice of the personal present in the name of a certain credible and desirable idea of the collective future. But for such a sacrifice to have any meaning, a symbolic attachment to the world and its future was required. Is it because such a connection is lacking today that the word progress is disappearing or curling up behind the single concept of innovation, now on the agenda of all research policies? ”

The idea of progress is the opposite of the start-up philosophy that runs in the short term, in a forward flight dictated by the dogma of innovation at all costs in the name of the market, without putting it in context Desire for the future. Not every innovation that meets a market is progress. Some examples? Allowing to share photos that fade on a social network is not a progress for humanity. Paying to choose the genetic characteristics of one’s children, is not a progress for humanity. Transplanting the blood of young adults to try to get younger rich businessmen to rejuvenate is not a progress. Allowing to meet men and women on a simple thumb on her phone is not a progress for humanity. It’s up to you to judge for yourself.

For all these reasons, France should not become a start-up, nor should it think and act as a start-up. France is a nation, a state, a people, a history, a culture that has to extricate itself from the permanent pivot, for it is capable of thinking the future in the name of a desirable idea for which its people are ready to sacrifice. These reversals of strategy startups who do not know where they go and what their model are the opposite. The French model is established “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity” and it has an eternal vocation, for France is not and will never be an enterprise, it is a Republic.

Inequality is putting the American Dream in peril

As I am a big fan of both Piketty and Harari in addition to being a start-up fan, I was attracted by this article from the Stanford Magazine: This is Not Your Parents’ Economy – Inequality is putting the American Dream in peril. Here is the most striking message:

According to the “Fading American Dream” paper, 92 percent of people born in 1940 earned more in income at age 30 than their parents did at age 30. Only 50 percent of those born in 1984 did.
[…]
In trying to explain why mobility has fallen so precipitously, Chetty, Grusky and their team considered two “counterfactual” scenarios for those born in the 1980s. The first assumes higher GDP growth, equivalent to that experienced by those born in 1940 but distributed as it has been recently. The second uses the real GDP growth for the 1980s cohort but assumes a “more broadly shared” distribution. As the paper explains, “the first scenario expands the size of the economic pie, dividing it in the proportions by which it is divided today. The second keeps the size of the pie fixed, but divides it more evenly as in the past.”
[…]
The higher GDP growth scenario did increase mobility — to 62 percent from 50 percent. But the more broadly shared growth scenario did even better, increasing mobility to 80 percent. To achieve that higher level of mobility using GDP alone would require growth of 6.4 percent per year. (Recent years have seen growth under 3 percent in the United States.)
[…]
“We were able to say, if you care about upward mobility, aggregate growth wouldn’t be enough to restore it; instead, growth needs to be more equitably distributed.”