In this keynote for Total and Ambrosetti’s Think Tank Basilicata, Dr. Jonathan Reichental reflects on the historical forces that created Silicon Valley, outlines the defining traits of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, and argues that southern Italy can become a hub for urban tech innovation. He attributes the birth of Silicon Valley to the Sputnik shock in 1957, which spurred massive federal investment in semiconductor research and the growth of a university ecosystem anchored by Stanford and UC Berkeley. This combination of focused government funding, talent attraction, and entrepreneurial culture generated a $800 billion annual capital output, making the region the fifth‑largest economy worldwide. Reichental then describes the Fourth Industrial Revolution as distinguished by global scope, unprecedented speed of change, and the convergence of multiple technologies, raising profound ethical and privacy concerns. He highlights the lag in government digitization, noting a trillion‑dollar opportunity to improve public services. Emphasizing that geographic location no longer limits innovation, he urges Basilicata to leverage its own assets—strong universities, access to capital, and risk‑tolerant public institutions—to attract talent and build the infrastructure for next‑generation urban solutions. His concluding recommendations focus on investing in higher education, ensuring capital availability, encouraging public‑sector risk‑taking, and making deliberate choices to shape a prosperous, technology‑driven future.
Chapters
This is working, right? Oh, it's working good. There we go. Firstly, just so delighted to be here. Thanks for the invitation from Total and from Ambrosetti. It's a great privilege to have the opportunity to share some thoughts today. I'm not sure that what I'm going to share is going to be uniquely novel or hasn't already been thought of. I'll just share my thoughts on Silicon Valley in the future. Read the report, and I think a lot of it makes a heck of a lot of sense. One observation I have by the fact that I am going around the world and talking about the future and talking about the future of our planet is I am seeing a lot of consistent trends. For example, I just got back from Vietnam and it seems like they're having the same conversation that we're having here about where they need to invest, where will the opportunity come in the future, Looking at areas that are not as well developed and figuring out how to develop those. They're doing something right over there because their economy is booming and long may it last. We saw the same thing in South Africa when we traveled there last year. The need to focus. And so it says to me, not only are we starting to get our priorities right, but it demonstrates to me a little bit more optimism that we actually believe that we can, for the first time, begin to solve what has historically been some tough issues. So my little talk in the limited time I have today is going to be a little bit about my thoughts on where things are headed from a technological perspective, coming from Silicon Valley. And I was asked to really zoom in on urban innovation, in particular the innovation that will go into making our towns and cities be great places to work. Now, often I'm asked, because it seems like I'm the ambassador for Silicon Valley, if such a thing should exist, is how did it happen? How did it happen? And there's only one word I can share with you, Please. I don't know what he said, but I said, shut up. Oh. So I'll pick it up where I left it. Just, why did Silicon Valley happen? I mean, when. You'll see in a moment. It's not particularly notable geographically, although the beaches are kind of nice, but the water's too cold. There's one word, it's Sputnik. Sputnik, right. The reason for Silicon Valley is The Russians, in 1957, they sent up the first satellite, and that satellite traveled over the US and it freaked us out. We didn't like that. Sputnik. Sputnik, yes, Sputnik, yeah. Yeah, this picture. And they were ahead of the United States. We panicked and said, we better catch up. And we knew that in order to have our own satellites, we'd need to have good innovation in transistors. And so the place to make transistors was in that area of Northern California. And it turned out it was quite useful to make them with semiconductors, semiconducting material. And there was a facility in North California to do that. Now, it all might have happened anyway, but this was certainly a massive catalyst. And money flowed to his point. To your point, money flowed. I think they were writing unlimited checks, went from the federal government into Silicon Valley, into the semiconductor plants, because we got to make something happen. And the lesson for me there, and the thing I'm trying to convey here, is that there's nothing like a super focused goal to get people motivated. We're good at that, actually, in the U.S. and so what you see is then that investment of money, and then the talent comes, and then the innovation comes. And it's been sort of like kind of the snowball effect once it gets going. And we've been doing it now for over 40 years, the only bad thing we can do is get in its way. When I joined the city of Palo Alto and I said to the city manager, you know, what should I focus on for the next six months and a year? And his answer was, don't break anything. What he meant was, it sort of works. Whatever we're doing in Silicon Valley sort of works. Just that small area alone of about 40 cities generates almost $800 billion of capitalization every year. And the state is the fifth biggest economy in the world. Silicon Valley now is contributing the most to the US Economy of any region. So there's something happening. But I can tell you this. We never rest on this idea. It's really important to continue to be good at what we do and continue to be innovative, because, you know, folks in Tel Aviv, you know, folks in China are telling us loud and clear they want to be the leaders, they want to beat us and be the next Silicon Valley Valley. I think you're right. I also don't know where to point this. There we go. And so I talked a little bit about the region itself. You know, comparing Silicon Valley geographically with Basilicata, there's absolutely night and day. There's nothing geographically interesting about Silicon Valley. In fact, a lot of you have visited, I realize, but we get many, many visitors, and they're disappointed because there's no center. There's very little in the way of Sort of broad, interesting culture other than tech or San Francisco. So you have much more advantages in geography than Silicon Valley has. Straight off the bat, what we do have in Palo Alto, and something that's a treasure, is Stanford University. And this is one of the areas, of course, where when after Sputnik was up there and we needed to get smart people working on our satellites, they were pumping money into this university, too. Not just for the purposes of getting satellites up there, but for military purposes. And Stanford doesn't talk about this often, but a lot of their original money from federal government came so we could innovate technology to be superior to the Soviet Union at the time. The university today is a significant contributor to the richness of Silicon Valley, as are several others. UC Berkeley's in the neighborhood and some others. And so my second piece of advice is to really work on the university piece. It attracts people. I heard this morning this discussion about there's emigration of young people from Basilicata, not immigration. Well, we have a lot of people come from all over the world to attend Stanford because it creates such an amazing rich academic experience. We have great professors and we churn out smart people who go on then to perpetuate the magic of Silicon Valley. Okay, so that's my little history on that. In the limited time I have, I'll move on quickly to where things are headed technologically. Now, we are in a golden era of tech, no question. Right. I think we all recognize that. And we've had a pretty good run for about 40 years. Right. And the question is, will it continue and where are we headed? In many ways, the best is yet to come. I'm from California, so I'm an optimist. I always have a sunny view of the future. With this change comes significant risk to the world in ways we haven't had to experience before. So you're hearing the term. I saw it in a few slides today, the notion of Industry 4.0, the next generation of how we produce goods and services. We are moving. We are at the beginning days, the beginning years of a fourth industrial revolution that is unlike anything we have ever seen before. Don't let anyone convince you that it's just like the previous revolutions. We'll get through it. In fact, not only will we get through it, but we'll probably create more jobs and more prosperity. A lot of the indicators suggest a much more unpredictable future. And by the way, not only unpredictable, but happening much more quickly than we've ever had to experience before. Some of the prior revolutions they took leading up to the first hundreds of years, then 100 years. This new revolution now is. I mean, I don't know if it's like this for you, but you can feel it in months, right? You can feel it in the months, you know, e scooters that are making a bit of noise around the place. They arrived in San Francisco from one day to the next. I went to San Francisco one day, no e scooters. A week later, they were everywhere. This stuff is happening exceptionally fast and we're not prepared for it. We're not prepared for it from a government perspective. Societal. Do we understand the privacy implications of rapid technological change? And even beyond privacy, the broader category of ethics, the big topic today in Silicon Valley is ethics, techno ethics. Because we can write software now, we can produce amazing solutions. But should we? And when we do, how do we protect people? So we're entering this new era and it potentially can create masses of new opportunity for new innovation. It will create tremendous disruption to existing businesses, to the workforce, and to our future. But nobody owns it. And that, I guess, is my third point. Why can't Italy own this? Why can't southern Italy own this? There's no geographic limitations anymore. You don't get a benefit from having an office, a facility in Northern California. You have the same benefit in Paris or Tel Aviv or Melbourne, Australia. And I say, why not here? So the fourth revolution should be an opening for leadership, for you to lead. Okay, where are we going? I'm just going to point to this randomly. So I want to just define four characteristics of what the fourth industrial revolution looks like and why I think it's different. I realize I'm going to go a little quickly through this, but when new technology is introduced, the scope is global. It's no longer just impacting a certain population. And then it grows over time. The scope is often global and, and sudden, and it affects a lot of different people. When a line of code is written on a Monday morning in Palo Alto, it can affect people in India, two or three hours later. Right. And in Italy, of course, the impact can be felt immediately through changing configuration files, you know, in an office in Tel Aviv. Okay, there we go there. The speed of change. I don't have to convince you of that. And then finally, and you won't often hear this, Airbnb Uber self driving cars don't happen because of just one technology. They happen because technology converges. Right? When many different technologies come together, and right now we're firing on all cylinders, a whole set of new technologies are emerging. And when we combine them, we create new innovation. And that's on one hand, exceptionally exciting, but terrifying at the same time too, because I don't know that we fully understand or yet understand the implications. Okay, so a deep dive real quick on what this may mean to the delivery of government. Right? I show this slide a lot. Some of you are smiling because you know where I'm going with this. This is what government looks like in a lot of the world. I've been to many, many cities, hundreds of cities around the world, and I can vouch for this. There are a few exceptions, but technically, government looks like this in a world when people want to deal with it like this, just like they do in the consumer world. And this digitization that needs to still take place according to the best consulting firms, is worth trillions of dollars, right? So not only is it economically positive, but it also is a better experience. Our communities, our citizens will get better experiences as we digitize. And again, I want to just kind of go back to a central thought here is nobody owns this yet, right? And as an urban innovator for many years myself, I was like, very frustrated. Why aren't we seeing tremendous innovation in a whole set of different systems from buildings to community health and infrastructure and transportation and energy and more and more? Well, it's difficult to do business with government. That's part of it, right. It's difficult to make money. Sometimes the timelines are too long. But the message I'm sending to software developers and innovators and business entrepreneurs and academia and public sector organizations is we need to get on this. The opportunity is ahead. And so as you look at maybe not only improving services in this area, which can become reasons for attracting people, but as you look to new industries, I propose to you look at urban innovation. There's no reason why you can't build the facilities here to enable the next generation of innovation, because the demand is huge. Right? So let me summarize in the last few seconds here with some key thoughts. When you look at regions that have historically succeeded and are now succeeding, they have a very robust university system. Focus on that. That's really important. And here's to your point. Got to pump some money into the system. You're going to have available capital. If you want young people or any type of people actually to come down here and innovate and build companies, they're going to have to have access to capital to make that happen. So some entity is going to, or collection of entities is going to have to provide that. The public, public sector entities across this region, and I'm honored that several are. Some of the leaders are in the audience today have to realize that not only do you have to invest in things that you might not see a return on in the short term, but you're going to have to take risks that traditionally governments have never taken. And we know that in Silicon Valley. People say it must be easy for you, Jonathan, because you're Silicon Valley. I say, no, it's as hard for me to convince, but you have to take those risks. And then finally, the quick point I'll make is throughout my short presentation that I've given to you today, and I think you'll hear it from other people, too. We've already heard it from several is in order to have the kind of future we want, it is a series of choices. We just have to make those choices. I think if we have leadership and we choose to do the risky things, I think there can be a great future here. So thank you very much. Grazia Miller.
