Taylor Davidson has a good post on "Can governments create entrepreneurial and innovation hubs?". Interesting discussion out there. More broadly the question is can government economic policies help create sector hubs - be it innovative or not. Here was my comment on Taylor's post:
For "fixed cost" industries, you also need a critical element: "natural market" with large scale. The latter explains why, for example, the US software industry was more successful than in any European countries. Building on this software industry, the web sector came very naturally as an extension.
Based on this logic and considering that the web industry is slowly becoming a "variable cost" industry, I would argue that it is today less difficult to build web start-up ecosystems in new locations (though it will be difficult to reach Silicon Valley scale)."
The pre-dominant view in the past decades has been that of total "lassez-faire" but recent events has catch-up on this view. Just as entrepreneurs take actions to make "things happen", governments can also to a certain degree. History, culture, economic envrionment vary by country so the levers to use vary by country. My point is not to push for complete government intervention but like in everything there are various shades of grey...

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