Wednesday, January 18, 2006

Investing in a flat world

As we’ve said several times here around Cisco, what the world needs are more Silicon Valleys around the world. More Silicon Valleys means greater competition and more innovation, which means more tech ideas can be turned into better tech products. From our point-of-view, this is also good news because with R&D teams all over the world collaborating and sharing information, that will only drive up bandwidth demands, which is music to our ears.

I got to be thinking about this because of some of the international deals that have been announced recently. SiliconBeat highlighted one such deal here.

There is a lot of talent in many parts of the world and it is good to see various companies invest in that talent. I think too many people associate the global spread of innovation with planting a huge R&D center in some far-flung part of the world. It seems to me that may be the least efficient way to further the cause of global innovation.

What perhaps is the most efficient is a more grassroots approach; to find innovative companies that may have a very different worldview than a company from Silicon Valley, fund that company and see if their particular business model or local-idea has relevance worldwide.

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