The USA is the source of almost all the technologies that define modern life: personal computers, operating systems, smartphones, e-commerce, web browsers, email, search engines, social networks, electric cars, and more.

In this book, Mehran Gul, winner of the Financial Times/McKinsey Bracken Bower award, asks: is this changing?

Less than a decade ago, the opinion of Chinese tech companies was often dismissive. Now alarm bells are ringing. However, as analysts discuss how the US-China tech battle will evolve, it is equally interesting to ask: are there more “Chinas” out there? Places no one takes seriously now, but which may prove massively competitive sooner than we think.

Samsung, a Korean company, competes with Apple to be the largest smartphone manufacturer in the world. Arm, founded in the United Kingdom, develops chip designs used in over 90% of all mobile devices. Spotify, based in Sweden, is the most popular music streaming service in the world.

But that’s not all. The most important semiconductor company in the world, TSMC, is in Taiwan. Another very important company in the semiconductor industry, ASML, is in the Netherlands. Some of the best-known games, such as Minecraft, Candy Crush, and Angry Birds, came from game studios in the Scandinavian countries. Almost all major electric battery manufacturers, such as CATL, LG, and SK On, are located in Asia.

This is a story about technology and the places where it finds its way in the world. Silicon Valley, for half a century, was unprecedented in producing technologies and rapidly growing, high-value, billion-dollar tech companies like Apple, Facebook, Google, which turned it into the center of the fastest wealth creation in human history. Its secrets are spreading to more places.

The geography of innovation is changing. The world has many more high-value tech companies than ever before, growing much faster than ever before, in many more places than ever before. This is a book about those places.

Pages: 368, Dimensions: 15.3x15.3cm