Sassafras Journal

I live in a small but once large industrial city in upstate New York. As a result, a lot of the policy discussion centers on how to revive growth in a city where all trends show decline.

I think this article gets it right in the sense that achieving growth entails embracing some risks:

All of those are well-intentioned efforts to build Silicon Valley-style technology hubs, but they are based on the same flawed assumptions: that government planners can pick industries they want to develop and, by erecting buildings and providing money to entrepreneurs and university researchers, make innovation happen.It simply doesn’t work that way. It takes people who are knowledgeable, motivated, and willing to take risks. Those people have to be connected to one another and to universities by information-sharing social networks.

From my experience it seems that embracing risk or much less failure is a tough sell to policy makers especially in local culture that may be utterly risk-averse.

Again, speaking from my own local experience, the notion of taking a chance finds few takers and of those that champion taking risks, they are often shut down before any meaningful execution can take place.