San Francisco : An Incubator of Disruptive Innovation
By: Uday Dandavate
Tags: Creative Class, San Francisco, Innovation

San Franciscans take pride in being disrupters of the status quo and pioneers of change.

San Francisco is a beautiful city; our distinct geography and culture attracts hordes of creative individuals to the city every year. Proximity to the ocean, sunshine and pleasant weather has made The City a perfect setting for nurturing innovation.

San Francisco challenges and inspires people to explore the unexplored, imagine the unimaginable and build what seems impossible to build. San Franciscans are audacious in their explorations and uninhibited in their expressions. They don’t fear failure. They are also not quick to judge or condemn others.

Creative Protest

Recently gentrification has created resentment among the Bohemia towards the techies who are perceived to be making the city unaffordable. Though the cost of living is, indeed, increasingly making living in the city unattainable, people keep flocking here from all over the country and the world. People come here to reinvent themselves—no matter what the cost. As the city prospers due to the success of its creative community, it will need to stay focused on preserving its core values and culture, and to create affordable living conditions for its Bohemia.

Pitching start up ideas in SOMA cafes

Numerous cafes and bars in the South of Market (SOMA) area are always bustling with young and creative people hustling disruptive start up ideas to prospective patrons. There is often something happening in the streets and parks of San Francisco—something weird, outrageous, provocative, edgy, alternative, assertive or rebellious that helps nurture the spirit of disruptive innovation.

Homeless have a support system in San Francisco

But San Francisco is not just about techies and start-ups. There is a place for everyone here. Hipsters and the homeless, techies and tattoo artists, belly dancers and bartenders, poets and peddlers, creative people and convicts just released from prison: everyone considers San Francisco a home due to its distinct character as a city that lives and thrives on the edge. Nobody is unwelcome here—everybody is accommodated and his or her peculiarities are often celebrated. The city of San Fransisco spends millions of dollars to look after its homeless population. I have heard that there was a time when other cities around the United States bought one-way ticket for homeless people to move to San Francisco.

Prototyping Market Street Festival

San Franciscans love championing a cause through collective actions, protests and celebrations. Critical Mass, a monthly protest by cyclists reclaiming the streets; San Francisco Pride Parade, annual event organized to celebrate the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people; Bay to Breakers, the longest footrace in the world; and the Folsom Street Fair (the annual BDSM and leather subculture street fair) are a few examples of San Francisco events where thousands of people assert the rights of marginalized communities and express their liberal views on controversial issues. Harvey Milk, became the first openly gay person to be elected to public office in California when he won a seat on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in 1977.

Critical Mass: San Francisco’s culture of mass action

When the sub-prime mortgage crisis crippled the US economy and venture capitalists tightened their purse stings, crowd sourcing of innovative ideas and crowd funding of ventures gained momentum in the Bay Area. While the rest of the country waited for the economy to turn around, Bay Area start-ups continued to pitch their ideas and build prototypes of innovative products and services with support from crowd funding. For the creative community of San Francisco despair was not an option: financial hardships of the recession period served as a fuel for imagination and challenge for persistence. I have learned that San Franciscans are focused on meaning making even when monitory gains seem distant.

Richard Florida, in his book “The Great Reset: How the Post-Crash Economy Will Change the Way We Live and Work,” explains the importance of meaning making versus money making:

“Too much of what led up to the crisis in the old bubble days — the conspicuous consumption, the latter-day Gatsbyism — was fueled by a need to fill a huge emotional and psychological void left by the absence of meaningful work. When people cease to find meaning in work, when work is boring, alienating, and dehumanizing, the only option becomes the urge to consume — to buy happiness off the shelf, a phenomenon we now know cannot suffice in the long term.” (Florida)

In San Francisco culture, I have experienced a sense of freedom from undue obsession with my ethnic identity. I have felt freedom from self-imposed measures of social status or material success. I have felt freedom from inhibition of being judged. I have felt the freedom to experiment with my identity. I have felt the freedom to experiment with participatory design and participatory politics.

When I look back at what I have experienced over the years I have spent in San Francisco I am reminded of Nobel Laureate Rabindra Nath Tagore’s poem,

“Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high

Where knowledge is free

Where the world has not been broken up into fragments

By narrow domestic walls

Where words come out from the depth of truth

Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection

Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way

Into the dreary desert sand of dead habit

Where the mind is led forward by thee

Into ever-widening thought and action

Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake”.

For those who are tired of living with the status quo, San Francisco offers infinite opportunities to discover what exploring freedom creatively and audaciously means.