Bob Medearis, Roger Smith, and Bill Biggerstaff founded Silicon Valley Bank in 1983. Smith ran the Bank as a startup business in the first decade. Subsequent CEO John Dean restructured the Bank and Ken Wilcox redirected the Bank with a central focus on exclusively serving the tech community. Greg Becker accelerated the Bank, connecting its past to the future. The bank’s assets grew at a fast pace during the pandemic. Becker tripled the size of the bank between 2019 and 2022.

Apple Computer, Inc. released its “Think Different” campaign in 1997 to mark the return of Steve Jobs and to resurrect the struggling computer company. The Think Different campaign “got an audience that once thought of Apple as semi-cool, but semi-stupid to suddenly think about the brand in a whole new way.”1 Interestingly, be different is what Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) embraced and practiced from its beginning in 1983. The Bank distinguished itself from the crowded banking sector by serving entrepreneurs in the region since the early 1980s. At the time SVB was formed and officially named, “Silicon Valley” was considered unattractive for banking to capture the public attention and adopted the available moniker.

Collaboration among groups occurs at multiple levels, from large international organizations consisting of multiple countries to small regional organizations within a country. International organizations promote collaboration among multiple nations that vary in scope from the global reach of the United Nations to the more specific objectives of the European Workplace Innovation Network. National organizations support innovation by providing guidance, partnerships, and financial assistance as exemplified in fighting the COVID-19 pandemic. National organizations can also encourage innovation by partnering with other organizations, as demonstrated by the Workplace Innovation Network for Canada. Government agencies work within countries but with a specific focus such as the United States Department of Energy and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). Regional alliances help coordinate efforts by connecting communities and regions to government agencies. An example is the Science Action Network, which provides mechanisms to improve trust and communication among government administrators, industry representatives, and scientists.

When we think about how innovation happens, we’re at a bit of a loss to understand it because our common-sense notions of innovation owe so much to Silicon Valley hype and propaganda. When we imagine innovation, we often think about strong personalities, aggressive and spectacular disruption, and ruthless profit-seeking. Scroggins suggests that much meaningful innovation actually happens beyond attempts at dispruptive innovation and attraction of venture capital where innovation is narrowly seen as a driver of economic activity. Instead, innovation tends to emerge from stable, rather boring groups of people working outside of job markets and for-profit corporations, on projects that are of personal or group interest, valuable to the people working on them for intrinsic, seemingly self-evident reasons. To show this, Scroggins describes two paths both taken in the same Silicon Valley do-it-yourself biotechnology laboratory. A neoliberal approach tried to use the democratization of a technology, in this case synthetic biology, as a lever to implement the classic disruptive strategy of entering low-end and opening new markets. The alternative approach proceeded on a slower and more deliberate path, without market forces and the promise of funding. What separated the alternative from the neoliberal approach is, according to Scroggins, its constant focus on community over commodity, and process over product.

As a megacorporation, Alphabet is, by definition, an organizational agent of the highest degree. Nevertheless, it is neither entirely self-defined nor self-created. In particular, it has been shaped by the Silicon Valley context from within which it emerged. Accordingly, the chapter’s first section provides an overview of the key actors and sectors that have helped define, and mythologize, Silicon Valley. Following this, Google’s emergence, success and transformation are described and explained. Then, and in accord with the characteristics detailed in Chapter 2, Alphabet is shown to be a megacorporation. As Alphabet’s global scale and broad scope, monopolistic tendencies, corporate social responsibility concerns and political-economic hybridity are relatively simple to describe, the chapter’s summary notes that it is the megacorporation’s existential impacts – on the extent, and our experience of, the past and the future – that is focused on throughout the book’s second part.

This chapter asks whether the Abe administration’s “third arrow” of structural reforms was useful in fostering innovation and strengthening the global competitiveness of Japan’s economy. It takes the Silicon Valley model and evaluates how much the third arrow of Abenomics added flexibility to some of the core institutions of Japan’s traditional model by pushing toward or adding institutional elements of the Silicon Valley model. The goal for Japan should not be piecemeal adoption but instead strengthening the institutional underpinnings that enable Japan’s startup ecosystem to flourish and coexist with the large-firm-dominated model. This chapter concludes that Abenomics’ third arrow legitimized the institutions supporting Japan’s startup ecosystem by amplifying trajectories of change already underway – not by forcing change in areas that were headed in a different direction. Since institutions supporting the startup ecosystem are emerging in parallel to the existing institutional configuration, the legitimacy provided by Abenomics’ third arrow reforms do represent positive developments and policy for helping innovation in Japan’s economy.

Human curation has earned itself a permanent place in the streaming media world, though it wasn’t always clear whether or how that would happen. For a time, it seemed like tech didn’t want to justify the use of human labour if the future could be won without it. That time seems to have passed, and with handmade playlists and other editorial products, human curators have a unique ability to help the widest-ever audiences find great music. People from different backgrounds are more able now to hear each other’s sounds than ever before. Whether the streamlining of these services matters to a given user is wholly subjective, since the joy of discovering new music is often so inefficient and chaotic. It was never clear that this same sense of joy would make it into streaming products – for many of us, it cannot. And that’s okay. Services offer only what they can.