The cognitive dissonance humans are capable of is amazing. To actually say “We would never allow that in our town.” in the pejorative while flying back from a trip specifically meant to learn how to be like another town.
If you’re not going to act on an author’s central point, don’t try to do any of the other parts (they’ll probably actually be harmful). If you’re not going to copy the central parts of something successful, don’t bother copying the other stuff.
The recipe for success of Silicon Valley is pretty straightforward. It has great colleges, great weather, and weak noncompetes. So people go there to start companies. And now it has a compounding cycle of attracting capital, founders and talent (recent events aside).
But a government employee from Boston can’t say that, cause they can’t do shit about it. It’s not like they’ll fix the weather or the noncompetes (too many entrenched medtech companies to change that now).
So they’ll say “they have accelerators!” and open a city sponsored accelerator and maybe some successful company will pop out in the next ten years.