Envisioning The Startup Ecosystem Of Tomorrow

Innovation. It plays a huge role in how we build the future. It has driven change literally throughout all of human history. Yet, certain periods and regions, such as the Florentine Renaissance, seem to have been more productive in this regard than others. More recently, we’ve looked to California’s Silicon Valley as a model for a new kind of Renaissance. But if that’s an accurate analogy and we want to duplicate its success elsewhere, what are the ingredients needed to create a truly innovative startup ecosystem?

I recently had the honor of being the opening keynote for Fly Asia 2022 in Busan, South Korea. The three-day conference focused on connecting Asia by sharing policy making and development strategies for startups in order to build a cooperative ecosystem that extends throughout the region. It was a wonderful opportunity to address some of these questions and consider what the future of such ecosystems might look like in the decades ahead. What technologies, approaches and business models will support and drive the proliferation of tomorrow’s unicorns? What conditions will we need to create to produce the trillion-dollar companies of the twenty-first century?