In Politico, venture capitalist Mark Andreesen writes about how to create innovation clusters. Instead of trying to copy Silicon Valley, policymakers

should be figuring out what domain is (or could be) specific to their region—and then removing the regulatory hurdles for that particular domain. Because we don’t want 50 Silicon Valleys; we want 50 different variations of Silicon Valley, all unique from each other and all focusing on different domains. . . .

There’s a key difference from the if-you-build-it-they-will-come argument of yore. Here, the focus is more on driving regulatory competition between city, state and national governments.

Of course, in that regulatory competition, Washington is not doing so well, as Dick noted last week.