McKinsey mapped innovation based upon the number of patents filed per company, the number of companies filing patents, the diversity of the sectors they were filed in and the growth in patent filing.
By measures such as these, Silicon Valley, Tokyo and Yokohama are twice as innovative as any other place on earth.
Big ‘old’ cities like Paris and New York do relatively poorly, but London stands out as being particularly dire with a measure of innovation equal to a provincial French city such as Grenoble, despite having a population 50 times its size (8M vs 150K).
Ah, but there is so much more to London as a financial capital?
But the banking industry has collapsed.
Ah, but there is so much more to London as the center of the country that brought us the industrial revolution?
But the manufacturing industry collapsed.
Ah, but there is so much more to London as a cultural capital?
But artists and creative types can’t afford to live there.
Ah, but there is so much more to London as a tourist destination?
But the weather…
The writing is on the wall for London. Its needs to invest in the future through innovation rather than the transient hubris of the Olympics, or its recent period of prosperity will mark the beginning of a secular decline. There were 1.8 million immigrants, representing 26 percent of the population, that flocked to London in the last ten years as the financial services industry sucked everything up in its wake. Many of these people were from developed countries with the ability and incentive to return home to places like Paris and Warsaw unless London promises more.
Via Oobject
Dave, lies, damned lies, etc… all of silicon valley or Tokyo is compared with Reading UK? no wonder the big agglomerations have higher diversity. And the period for momentum is suspect – looking at http://www.uspto.gov/go/taf/cst_all.pdf – you get total UK patent growth of 49% in 97-06 vs US of 46%, which suggests the UK’s holding its own. But shift two years to 99-08 and you get -2% for both UK and US. Sod the bankers, the management consultants need hunting…
-ben
PS london’s still fun, drop by sometime!
I agree with some of your criticisms about London, but strongly disagree that artists and creative types can’t afford to live here. I’m not one of them (I work in IT) but I meet them constantly. They may not be able to afford to live in South Kensington or other banker areas of London, but they still live very centrally. Just walk around Shoreditch on the first Thursday of the month — the number of creative types would leave any banker feeling ostracized.
And as Ben says, it’s still a blast here.
@Lydgate.
“Just walk around Shoreditch on the first Thursday of the month — the number of creative types would leave any banker feeling ostracized.”
I lived in Shoreditch from 1992-1998. you could rent or buy a genuine industrial loft for less than a tenth of the current price (A 1000sq. ft loft was less than 40,000 GBP then). At the time the area had the largest number of artists in Europe.
I visited Shoreditch for the first time in 5 years, a month ago. In the bars, stores and in the East London branch of Soho House, there were many bankers mixing with locals. The mix of people was reminiscent of the denizens of West London’s gentrified areas such as Notting Hill in the 80s. People ranged from trust fund hipsters to bankers to students and some locals, but there was no indication of cutting edge artists compared to somewhere like Berlin.
I would suggest that Shoreditch is actually emblematic of London’s imminent decline. Like New York’s Williamsburg, it looks gritty like when it was cool, but has an enormous amount of money flowing through it which distracts people from the fact that it is no longer a creative center.
The majority of artists have gone from Shoreditch and the flow of money is about to shut off. It will still be gritty but in a depressing, empty way, like a boarded up nightclub.