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• January 7, 2025

Reimagining Geography Of Innovation

Edward Glaeser had  said  that cities are the biggest invention and innovation of humanity ,   this thought was  pivot   for a talk on  intersection of innovation and cities during “Future Cities Summit” Annual Technical Shaastra 2025 @ IIT Madras  by Mentor Srijan Sanchar   Shailendra  Jaiswal  .

 

Cities enable the collaboration that makes humanity shine most brightly.

Reasons for existence of city is that they are transaction maximization structures. Cities are incubator of ideas because it is in cities that diverse perspectives are available in proximity to each other and  the diversity facilitates synergy  .  Cities, the dense agglomerations that dot the globe, have been engines of innovation since Plato and Socrates bickered in an Athenian marketplace. The streets of Florence gave us the Renaissance, and the streets of Birmingham gave us the Industrial Revolution. The great prosperity of contemporary Silcon Valley London and Bangalore and Tokyo comes from their ability to produce new thinking. The close physical proximity  in cities makes learning new skills and copying other ideas much easier. People can recombine those ideas with other ideas to make new innovations .  Srijan  Sanchar contributions  to understanding of  cities  comes from its insight  that cities are negenetropic  structures ,that create order out of chaos .

Next  stop of  Innovation Bandwagon .

“We are at our most creative when we have something to push against. Creativity does not require perfect conditions. In fact, it thrives in imperfect ones. The block of marble from which Michelangelo carved his masterpiece, the David, had been discarded by other artists. They considered it defective, and they were right. But Michelangelo saw that defect as a challenge, not a disqualifier.”

In this regard Srijan Sanchar brought forward the notion that the most important resource of humanity is shared  belief and values  ,  it is shared  belief and values  that enables large scale flexible cooperation the  key ingredients of cities . The  talk explored  the likely  places that would be hotspots of innovation  . What  are  likely hot spots of  Innovation ?