Back in his 2013 State of the Union address, President Obama pledged to ask Congress to finance 15 of innovation and manufacturing hubs to “turn regions left behind by globalization into global centers of high-tech jobs … and guarantee that the next revolution in manufacturing is made right here in America.”

Except this mechanistic, top-down approach — bring together business and universities in some government-funded space sprinkled with tax incentives — has a terrible record of success. Here is economist Enrico Moretti, author of “The Geography of Jobs,” in an EconTalk podcast in 2012:

If you look at the history of America’s great innovation hubs, they haven’t found one that was directly, explicitly engineered by an explicit policy on the part of the government. It’s really hard. This is not how innovation hubs and clusters get developed. They often get developed because of idiosyncratic factors like a local firm succeeds and it starts attracting more firms like that. And this creates a cluster that then becomes stronger and stronger, and that feeds on itself.

No one knows this better than venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, who in an essay over at Politico offers his own organic recipe for creating the next Silicon Valley-type innovation hub.

But policymakers shouldn’t be trying to copy Silicon Valley. Instead, they 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.

Imagine a Bitcoin Valley, for instance, where some country fully legalizes cryptocurrencies for all financial functions. Or a Drone Valley, where a particular region removes all legal barriers to flying unmanned aerial vehicles locally. A Driverless Car Valley in a city that allows experimentation with different autonomous car designs, redesigned roadways and safety laws. A Stem Cell Valley. And so on.

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. There are many new categories of innovation out there and entrepreneurs eager to go after opportunities within each of them. Rethinking the regulatory barriers in specific industries would better draw the startups, researchers and divisions of big companies that want to innovate in the vanguard of a particular domain—while also exploring and addressing many of the difficult regulatory issues along the way.

Andreeseen goes on to say that this sort of regulatory arbitrage also helps end the regulatory capture of of government by incumbent business, a favorite topic of mine.

Follow James Pethokoukis on Twitter at @JimPethokoukis, and AEIdeas at @AEIdeas.