Stanford journalism professor G. Pascal Zachary has this piece in today’s New York Times that reinforces a disheartening idea for those of us who don’t live in Silicon Valley: when it comes to technology innovation, the Northern California corridor is the place to be. Even when good ideas crop up elsewhere first (Zachary talks about a man he met seven years ago in Singapore who had developed a “breathtaking” device, an MP3 player that was ultimately eclipsed by the iPod), Silicon Valley-based companies still manage to come out on top.
That’s because the 50-mile area between San Jose and San Francisco is a magnet for money and ideas. Tech innovators flock to the region because, well, that’s where success seems to take place. It’s a reinforcing cycle — the Valley is known as a breeding grounds for success and therefore tends to attract the people who are likely to be successful.
“All that venture capital attracts a lot of ideas — and the people who are having those ideas,” said Stephen B. Adams, an assistant professor of management at the Franklin P. Perdue School of Business at Salisbury University in Maryland who has studied the rise of Silicon Valley.
Newcomers plug into an existing network of seasoned pros that “isn’t matched anywhere else in the world,” says AnnaLee Saxenian, dean of the School of Information at the University of California, Berkeley, and author of “Regional Advantage,” a book about the competitive edge held by tech centers like Silicon Valley and the Route 128 suburbs near Boston. “That allows people to recombine technical ideas much more quickly here than anywhere else,” Professor Saxenian added.
Most people intuitively understand this magnetism about Silicon Valley. But what’s really interesting is that this tech region has, so far, recovered time and again from busts that could have easily allowed other high-tech areas of the globe to take the top spot. Zachary calls these serial renewals a “marvel.”
Americans naturally harbor many fears about losing their edge, especially with the nation mired in war, the dollar’s value sliding and the health care system strained. Rivals, notably in India and China, see Silicon Valley’s pre-eminent position as a prize that they will inevitably take. Yet they face an elusive foe. Every time Silicon Valley recovers from failure, it seems to grow more durable, almost in the same way a person becomes “immune” to a disease after a brush with it.
Cynthia Brumfield at 11:27 AM|Comments(0)
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