Mehran Gul, "The New Geography of Innovation: The Global Contest for Breakthrough Technologies" (Simon and Schuster, 2026)
New Books in Southeast Asian StudiesShow Notes
Increasingly, it seems like the corporate names that dominate headlines are much more diverse than they used to be. Samsung, TSMC, and SK Hynix. Alibaba and Tencent; BYD and DeepSeek. Sea and Grab.
For twenty-five years, it seems like every major technology was American . That assumption is now under strain as innovation spreads from one place to many.
Mehran Gul tries to map out this new network in his book The New Geography of Innovation: The Global Contest for Breakthrough Technologies (Simon and Schuster, 2026). From China's startlingly messy AI ecosystem to Singapore's government-led innovation, from South Korea's decades-old conglomerates still at the frontier to India's world-class talent that too often works abroad; from Europe's struggle to hold on to its best companies, to the deeper role of the state everywhere—including in Silicon Valley—and why the United States, far from declining, is extending its lead into a genuinely bipolar technological order.
Mehran is a winner of the Financial Times/McKinsey Bracken Bower Prize. He attended Yale where he was a Fulbright Scholar, Fox International Fellow, and Teaching Fellow. He has been a Lead for the Digital Transformation of Industries at the World Economic Forum and an expert on Higher Education, Entrepreneurship, and Industrial Policy at the United Nations Industrial Development Organization. Before Yale, he studied at the Lahore University of Management Sciences. He has been a visiting scholar at the Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi and a Fellow with the Acumen Fund.
You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of The New Geography of Innovation. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.
Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon.
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