Davos Newbies

Today’s Financial Times reports (for subscribers only) that SpongeBob SquarePants will soon launch in Japan and China. No surprise there, but the scale of SpongeBob’s success certainly struck me: “The character has generated $4bn so far in retail sales alone, and its consumer products revenues are growing at about 25 per cent a year in the 22 international markets in which the line has launched.”

Having launched in 1999, SpongeBob is a year younger than Google. $4 billion and 22 markets is an amazing record in that time.

In the circles I run around in, there’s a lot of head-scratching these days on how the US and other advanced economies will remain innovative and competitive with the rise of India and China. I remain pretty bullish about the prospects for the economy as a whole (employment and wealth distribution may be another issue), because I think it will take a very long time for developing countries to replicate – to say nothing of replace – the innovation ecology that produces a SpongeBob or a Google.

You can read an extreme statement of my kind of optimism in Tom Peters. Take away his exclamation points, and I agree with much of what he writes. The contrast is the doom-mongering from Tom Friedman.

That said, the US certainly seems to take a cavalier attitude to its great, innovation-producing strength. Living in Berkeley, I’m acutely aware of the pressures on the amazing government-funded educational and research institutions like the University of California. Add into the mix the Bush administration’s disdain for science and there’s the potential for the US to fall a long way eventually. Fortunately, unlike the development of a Google or a SpongeBob, these kinds of shift take a very long time to work through the system. There’s still time to recover from the mistakes being made today.