Untitled - socium.ge

50 Pekka Himanen and Manuel CastellsFinnish model has political relevance both for these countries and for theworld at large. Suddenly, the European tradition of government guidance andconcern for social protection is no longer necessarily sentenced to historicaloblivion. And, for the developing world, the transformation of Finland froma relatively poor country in 1950, mostly making a living from agricultureand forestry with 50 percent of its population employed in the primary sector,to a leading global economy fifty years later provides cause for reflection forcountries trying to “leapfrog” into the information age.As for the Silicon Valley model, the region around the San Francisco BayArea has been the seedbed of the information technology revolution since thelate 1950s. It has been at the forefront of the successive waves of entrepreneurialand technological innovation that have constituted the infrastructureof the information age: the microelectronics revolution of the 1960s and1970s, the development of personal computers and recombinant DNA in the1970s, the adoption and development of UNIX and open-source software(together with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology) in the 1980s, theexplosion of Internet applications and businesses in the 1990s, and, in theearly twenty-first century, nanotechnology, advanced genetic engineering,and the convergence between microelectronics, computing, and biologicaltechnologies.As so much of the innovation system and so many businesses in the “neweconomy” of the US are based on the replication and expansion of the experienceof the Silicon Valley innovation complex, we use the notion of “SiliconValley” as a proxy for the underlying model of innovation that has inducedeconomic productivity, organizational networking, and cultural change in theUnited States as a whole. Our observations will focus on the specificprocesses of Silicon Valley’s innovation model, although the aggregate dataon the performance of economic and technological processes will refer to theUnited States, as statistical sources for comparisons and rankings use countriesas the accounting unit.However, when we refer to the Silicon Valley or Finnish “model,” we donot in either case mean a normative model to be followed by other societies:a simple imitation would not, of course, be possible as societies have to transformthemselves on the basis of their own history, institutions, and culture.Our purpose here is purely analytical. The fact that the “Finnish model” hasperformed technologically and economically as well as the “Silicon Valleymodel,” albeit on a vastly smaller scale, means that there is not just one wayinherent in the dynamics of information technology for it to be the lever of asuccessful information economy. Thus, there is political choice and there arepolicy alternatives in the ways in which institutions shape the network society.Yet, in the context of this book, we will resist normative judgments andleave the debate on political decisions to people and governments.