Silicon Valley? The wrong place to look for innovation!

He uses the approach which others only study theoretically and call a future model of journalism. The Frenchman Francis Pisani is an entrepreneurial journalist. He prepared for his new self-funded journalistic project for eight months: a trip around the world in search of those places where the innovative ideas of the future come into being. Pisani lived in Silicon Valley for more than 15 years reporting on new technologies. However, the 69-year-old journalist is sure that innovations of the future will come from other places throughout the world. Since September 2011, he has visited more than 30 cities on five continents, from Mexico City to Recife, Brazil, from Accra and Nairobi to Cape Town in Africa, from Cairo to Beirut and Tel Aviv. He has been in Russia, India and Indonesia.

The last part of his journey takes him to Singapore, Tokyo, Beijing and finally to New York and San Francisco. Pisani secures the funding of his project Winch5 (stands for Wave of Innovation and Change on 5 continents) himself by selling his articles to dozens of clients worldwide. He reports on his trip in a number of well-known publications such as Le Monde, El País, Folha de São Paulo or Clarin in Argentina. He also blogs for the Telefonica foundation and for the consulting firm Capgemini. Pisani is fluent in five languages. He was a Nieman fellow at Harvard University and a visiting professor at the universities of Berkeley and Stanford. His articles have been published in more than 100 newspapers and magazines all over the world. The knowledge of many languages and his flawless reputation as a journalist help him to promote his work worldwide.

You lived and reported on technology in Silicon Valley for many years. Today, you are saying that in just a few years time, technology will no longer be coming from Silicon Valley but rather from other places in the world. How did you get this idea?

There are a number of reasons for this. On the one hand, Silicon Valley has lost its dynamics. I’m not the only one who sticks to this opinion. For example, Dave Winer, one of the founding fathers of blogs, or Nick Denton, the founder of Gawker.com, have come to the very same conclusion. They left for New York because the city is much more dynamic. In the meantime, others also show their frustration.

I can still remember an interview in 1996 with Jerry Yang who founded Yahoo. At that time, his bicycle was standing in the first office which Yahoo rented and the first employees were sleeping there, as well. So Jerry Yang said to me: “I want to change the world and become a billionaire.” Today, Silicon Valley still doesn’t exhibit a lack of highly qualified people, with the only difference that they just want to become rich. The uncompromising desire to change the world is no longer there. On top of this, the challenge to increase personal productivity, which motivated people before, has been overcome. Personally, I think that there are actually too many ideas which have already been developed in recent years, especially those regarding Web 2.0.

However, the situation is quite different in other parts of the world. There are people all over the world who have recognized innovation as a source for growth and development. They are looking for venture capital and trying to gain the necessary qualification. Today, you need increasingly less capital to found a start-up and you can cooperate with like-minded persons from all over the world through the Internet.

Which places have surprised you most?

You can find geeks anywhere, including the poorest and less developed places. I was mostly impressed by the people in Accra, Ghana and in Nairobi. In the Middle East, I was particularly impressed by Lebanon and Israel. I have no doubts that Israel is soon to become one of the leading IT nations. I was also extremely excited by Recife in Brazil. The city attracts smart people and start-ups from the whole country, as well as from abroad and has become the third most important technology location in Brazil.

Can you name a couple of examples for the initiatives we should keep an eye on?

There is a company in Ghana named NandiMobile. It helps other companies offer a better service to their customers through SMS and artificial intelligence. Another example would be a start-up Mpedigree which helps you check if a medicine is genuine or counterfeit.

Also, there is ShopAfrica53.com, an online shop which helps local African companies to bring their products to the market. The shop was founded by Herman Chinery-Hesse who was introduced to me as the Bill Gates of Africa.

In Nairobi, there is a money transfer system M-Pesa belonging to Safaricom, whose importance still can’t be estimated properly. M-Pesa allows you to make transfers through your mobile phone. That means you can go to a market in Nairobi and pay with your mobile phone, which would be impossible in Paris. These are only a few examples from the long list.

Who are the people making these innovative ideas come true? There is often criticism that the innovations of western industrial nations are still dominating the market and that a lot of initiatives in the developing nations have been launched by the Europeans or Americans who do nothing but bring already developed projects to the local markets.

Well, at the time when the information technologies were at an early stage, there were many professionals from the North or people from the South who had been trained in the North. But this phase is almost over now. In any case, there’s no reason to distrust a Kenyan, Lebanese or an Indian just because they have spent a couple of years in the United States or in Britain.

We live in an open world and anyone can receive their education and learn new things wherever they want to. What’s crucial is that those people return to their home countries and work there to help their fellow countrymen solve their problems. And that happens. For instance, Adel Youssef from Egypt, the founder of Intafeen, who is a former Google fellow and developer of My Location, has come back to Egypt to program this Arabic geolocation service.

Many of those who criticize the above mentioned developments forget one thing: that the best ideas in Silicon Valley as well as in other northern countries come from the best brains in the South. Many of the start-up founders in the region of San Francisco Bay of the last 30 years were born outside the USA. An example here would be one of the co-founders of Instagram, who is a brilliant developer from Brazil.

Under which conditions can an innovation come into being?

First of all, you need geeks. Many of them have taught themselves programming in the Internet, that’s why an Internet connection is important. And you need a company and money. Many founders start with the money which their families or friends give to them. Problems often occur when there is a need for the second and third round of financing.

The mobile phone is changing the world in the way no other technical device has ever done. How far has it changed societies in the developing countries?

In my view, Africa is ahead of western Europe and the US in a fundamental way: we still see mobile as a complement while they have already made it their strategic means of access to information and communication.

Everybody has a mobile phone because it is cheap. The share of smartphones is between one and five percent which is extremely low. However, there are a lot of innovative approaches regarding the use of SMS. Feature phones are quite popular and can be used in a number of sophisticated ways. That is where we can learn from the South.