The next Steve Jobs will he Chinese?

The same day the world lost Steve Jobs , on October 5, India’s Minister of Human Resource Development, Kapil Sibal , had triumphantly to New Delhi the latest local invention: Aakash, one tablet to 30 euros. After the Tata Nano , the car in 2500 dollars (2000 euros), the Indians launched the iPad the poor. A beautiful way to honor the genius of the creator of Apple, even if Steve Jobs, the perfectionist, would probably find much to fault in design and software of the find in India.

Out of the brains of the Indian Institute of Technology Rajasthan and developed by UK company DataWind, the tablet Aakash must be distributed to half a thousand students to start , then, if the experiment proves successful, it will be marketed to connect tens of millions of rural children and adults, the resources of the modern world. Indian technology continues in its own way, the dream of Nicholas Negroponte, the American who founded the Media Lab at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), that of providing a laptop to each child.

Aakash reach there, on the scale of emerging countries, the phenomenal success of the iPad? Western experts doubt it, wrongly or rightly. But the bottom line is that the adventure continues. Part of the United States, the digital revolution has spread worldwide and now the emerging powers are meant to turn homes innovation. “There will not be another Steve Jobs” , How sad, after the announcement of his death, Fred Anderson , who was with him the chief financial officer of Apple. Maybe he should ask the question another way: the next Steve Jobs will he American?

Several factors explain why, in the land of Silicon Valley and Route 128, the technology park close to Boston, this issue is not completely crazy. An indoor climate, first, because of budget cuts and the threat of recession, over which floats a heady perfume of declines. The intellectuals are afraid, predicting some shortness of breath of innovation, the other “end of the future” .

A lack of idealism, perhaps the disappearance of recklessness: what young American today would dare, as did Steve Jobs give up six months after a hard-won place at a good university to go tinkering in the garage of his parents? Last but not least, the rise of countries with their desire to produce in turn the gray matter of world quality. China, in particular, no longer satisfied to be the world’s workshop, she also wants to be the laboratory. And at a time when the debt crisis reduced the budgets of Western countries, the Chinese, themselves, are returning their scholars trained in the best American science centers and invest heavily in research. In short, the Middle Kingdom, which has already given mankind the compass, gunpowder and printing, threatens the supremacy of Western intellectual and technological.

So much for the “narrative” dear to simple souls who like to see the world in black and white. The reality is a little more nuanced.

A small example: three Nobel science prizes (physics, chemistry and medicine) were awarded this week to seven winners. All seven are Western. China’s dream, but it still has no Nobel prize, except those attributed to Chinese immigrants in the West.

The last delivery of the dashboard that the OECD regularly publishes industry, science and technology shows that the U.S. retain a very large lead in innovation and science, in terms of investment, size and scope. In 2009, they spent nearly $ 400 billion to research, or 2.7% of GDP, far ahead of China, certainly came in second (with the exception of the European Union), but with 154 billion and 1.7% of GDP. If we stick to the rankings of universities, research published in academic journals and the number of patents, Western countries also keep a comfortable lead. This should not blind : a study of Thomson Reuters provides that in 2011 China will overtake the United States and Japan in the number of patents filed. In some areas, such as genetics and pharmaceutical research, the Chinese are very advanced. None of the horizon can not stop : they venture into space and have just installed a base for exploring the South Pole.

However, China failed to reproduce the recipes of the prodigious success of Silicon Valley – the coincidence on the same site, gray matter, capital and industry – not the wealth that is, to United States, the fabric of innovative homes smaller, geographically diverse of the West Coast to the East Coast. Above all, innovation is a culture, a philosophy. It does not give its full potential in a climate of free competition, free movement of ideas, free exchange of opposing views. This is not the climate then prevailing in China today, and probably why the next Steve Jobs will not be Chinese.

In the country that produces the largest number of Apple products, some have said loud and clear, the death of Steve Jobs. “When will we have our own Steve Jobs ?, Friday asked the liberal daily of Canton, Nanfang Dushibao . Admittedly, China has no tradition of creativity, but this tradition is not inherited, it is created. If China can build a political and cultural environment freer and more open, it will one day his great creative “. A university Hunan, Jiang Zongfu, lamented on his blog that China Mao Zedong, but not Steve Jobs. “Our education system could not have appreciated Steve Jobs , he writes. If Jobs was born in China He worked on the production line at Foxconn, or he would have become street thug. ” In his famous speech at Stanford in 2005, Steve Jobs was launched to students: “Stay hungry, stay foolish” (“Stay Hungry, stay crazy “). Hungry, the Chinese are. They lack just madness.