Mehran Gul, "The New Geography of Innovation: The Global Contest for Breakthrough Technologies" (Simon and Schuster, 2026)

So I think this is one of those rare instances where the author's title sort of survives intact.

And the original essay that was based on was also called The New Geography of Innovation.

I think the genesis of the book really is if you go back five years, which is not that much time, but things were radically different during COVID, for instance, where...

There was just so much coverage out there which talked about how U.S. power is in decline.

Silicon Valley isn't what it used to be anymore.

Silicon Valley isn't what it used to be anymore.

The decline of geography, innovation is moving to the cloud.

I think today it's hard for people to appreciate just how different the conversation was before the AI boom happened in 2022.

Very notable intellectuals like Alan Greenspan, who is perhaps the most consequential economist of his generation, wrote a book called Capitalism in America, in which he predicted that the creative destruction that set the US apart from Asian and European competitors, that's becoming less of a feature in its economy, and it's becoming to look more like countries on the old continent.

And so in that timeframe, there was just a lot of predictions about American decline.

At the same time, you saw China rising.

This is where companies like DGI, for instance, were coming up.

TikTok was just becoming a global phenomena.

And so that's why I thought it would be interesting to examine the question of, we were so used to, for 25 years, a world where just about every major tech company, every major consequential technology, from semiconductors to desktops to the internet to... social media, just everything was American.

And that was almost sort of a given.

And so from the vantage point of the year 2020, 2021, it was an interesting question to ask, are we moving to a different world? And sort of fast forward 2025, 2026, Things are different.

It's not that the US is still in a commanding position, though it is, but obviously China is the big difference.

If we were in a unipolar technological order, now it is unquestionably a bipolar technology order.

in which other countries, if they're not broad-based competitors, they still play an outsized role.

The only trillion-dollar companies outside the U.S. are not in China.

They're not in Europe.

They're in places like Taiwan and South Korea.

These are companies like Samsung, SK Hynix, and TSMC.

So the geography of innovation has changed, even if predictions of American decline were vastly exaggerated five or six years ago.