Looked at through this sports prism, the innovation landscape is simple. The US is still far ahead. America is responsible for almost all the breakthrough technologies that define the current era AI, smartphones, social networks just as it was responsible for all the breakthrough technologies that defined the last era PCs, the internet, semiconductors. Three of the world's most consequential AI companies - OpenAI, Anthropic and Databricks - are headquartered within 3.2km of each other in San Francisco. Nvidia is so dominant in the market for high-end chips that one commentator remarks that "there's a war going on in AI out there, and Nvidia is the only arms dealer".
Yet China is breathing down America's neck - and in some areas, such as surveillance and hypersonic rockets, it's taking the lead. The most cited paper on AI, known as the ResNet paper, was written by four Chinese scholars who have never studied outside the country. More than 1 300 foreign companies have opened advanced scientific research labs in China to tap into the country's growing talent pool. And Europe? The combined value of all the tech companies on the continent is far less than the value of just one US company, Microsoft.
But what happens if we go beyond the sports metaphor? A new book by Mehran Gul, of the World Economic Forum, The New Geography of Innovation , suggests that the picture is much more interesting. There are, in fact, lots of different innovation races with different end points and different measures of success. The US might be good at breakthrough innovation in the private sector. But what about incremental innovation in the public sector? Feed in different measures, and you get different results.
If you focus on the dissemination of new ideas rather than their invention, China is arguably well ahead of the US. It is well documented that China excels as a fast follower thanks to its combination of engineering prowess and work ethic. China has twice as many miles of high-speed rail than any other country. BYD sold nearly 607 000 EVs in the second quarter of this year compared with Tesla's 384 000. DJI sells more commercial drones than everyone else combined.
Switzerland, where Gul lives, combines a similar enthusiasm for mittelstand companies with a genius for big public projects such as the Swiss railway system, surely one of the wonders of the world, the Large Hadron Collider, and Cern the European Organisation for Nuclear Research. Thanks to Cern, the world's first website was not a dot-com or a dot-net but a dot-ch, which stands for Confederatio Helvetica, Switzerland's Latin name.