Korea Tour: Stickers, Starcraft, Success with Danny Crichton

Published: Dec. 18, 2014, 5 a.m.

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In Seoul\'s Sinchon district, Colin talks with\\xa0Danny Crichton,\\xa0researcher and writer on regional innovation hubs and a\\xa0contributing writer for TechCrunch.\\xa0They discuss the hardest thing about being a Korean entrepreneur; what the concentration of Seoul has facilitated about Korean innovation; how he got from an interest in China "because it\'s China" to a more fully developed interest in Korea; what happened to Sony, and thus Japan; how he responds to the current Korean of question, "Is this really a developed country?"; how people have stopped putting up with the country\'s corruption, perhaps one of the drivers of its astonishing growth; how the ideas of the "heterodox" economist Ha-joon Chang apply to all this; why\\xa0the concept of the subway-station "virtual grocery store" caught his eye; why Silicon Valley is so much more boring than Seoul; the significance of Kakaotalk and its abundance of purchasable "culturally ambiguous stickers"; why so many things, like playing\\xa0Starcraft\\xa0in stadiums,\\xa0seem only to work in Korea; how Korea got a highway torn down in eight weeks; what thinking led to the new city of Songdo 43 train\\xa0stops outside Seoul, and what it proves, negatively, about how "people want to live near other people"; why you can\'t just "build innovation"; how\\xa0he found both\\xa0Hello Kitty Planet and a giant Bible; organic agglomeration versus the deliberate agglomeration the Korean government has tried to incentivize; the country\'s distinctive capitalist-socialist\\xa0"hybrid model"; whether the government can really pick winners; how much advantage hugeness gives a country\\xa0these days; what he learned from Singaporean entrepreneurs, who have to go straight to the global market, and why the United States hasn\'t had to think globally; his early exposure to Silicon Valley culture, and how he got interested in the connections between universities, industries, and government; how the strength of America\'s universities, even today, remains the country\'s strength; how the idea of "what Korea needs" still has more traction than the equivalent in the U.S., though less than it did in the past; whether Americans have begun to realize that they can find opportunities in other countries; why Americans cling so tightly to the decade or two after the Second World War as if it were the rightful state of things; what comparisons he can make between the challenges facing San Francisco and those facing Seoul; the "pragmatic urban development philosophy" in Seoul versus the "almost religious zealot"\\xa0one in San Francisco; the difference between cities that think of the future as good, and those that don\'t; why he thinks "a little bit about Thailand"; why strategically wrong choices don\'t persist in Korea quite as long as in America; whether Korea can cure\\xa0it\'s "education fever" and resultant title culture; and the greater effect Korea\'s laws have on its entrepreneurs than its culture does.

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