Replicating Silicon Valley: talent and techno-management in a culture of serendipity (original) (raw)
Related papers
Silicon Valley: An Elusive Utopia?
Academia Letters, 2021
Silicon Valley's development history is adumbrated as a background for suggesting the need to develop a strategy for dealing with contemporary problems emanating from overweening success. Earlier development strategies emphasized private over public objectives, despite some notable exceptions. It is timely to recall and build upon some of those anomalies, like the movement to save the bay and especially the unique brainstorming process that formulated and implemented a strategy to address the 1990's recession. Silicon Valley, built through the collaborative pursuit of innovation, needs to extend its capabilities from the private to the public sphere.
Silicon Valley reinvents the company town
2000
California's Silicon Valley, famous for its innovative high-technology corporations, makes an ideal laboratory for exploring certain cultural inventions. It is a bellwether for a particular kind of social order-one dominated by work. In anthropology we encounter many frameworks through which life is organized-kinship, religion, and politics. Work is another lens through which life can be filtered. People may move to California for the weather, but they go to Silicon Valley to work. High-technology work draws on a global pool of talent and shifting skills that creates a culturally complex community. Migrants to Silicon Valley bring and enact an image of a place to do cutting-edge work. Leaders and pundits in the region consciously market the idea that the Valley can reinvent itself to continue to dominate its distinctive economic niche. Out of this reinvention a novel version of the company town has emerged, a twenty-first century reworking of a community where work penetrates and dominates the lives of its inhabitants.
Navigating Silicon Valley's Contradictions
Anthropology News, 2018
and a Distinguished Fellow at the Institute for the Future. English-Lueck is the author of four ethnographies about Silicon Valley including Cultures@SiliconValley, now in the second edition, which explore the way in which work reframes regional life.
Growing where you are planted: Exogenous firms and the seeding of Silicon Valley
Research Policy, 2011
What are the respective roles of indigenous and exogenous factors in the development of high-tech regions? Entrepreneurs and their start-ups have dominated Silicon Valley's economy in recent decades, but a different dynamic was at work from 1940 to 1965, when the Valley emerged as a formidable high-tech region. In key industries (electronics, semiconductors, computers, and aerospace) that defined Silicon Valley as a high-tech cluster during that period, companies based elsewhere played critical roles in planting the organizations that would -through the innovations they made, the technical talent they attracted, and the start-ups they spun off -help make the Valley the world's most admired and emulated high-tech region.
Cluster Genesis, 2006
This chapter considers the world's most iconic cluster: Silicon Valley. The emergence of Silicon Valley shares some features with the motion picture industry; both places experienced an inflow of entrepreneurs from other parts of the country and also saw a novel business model emerge. The environment that existed in the late 1950s, later known as Silicon Valley, was not unique; similar conditions existed in Boston and New York, for example. Both places were also influenced by policies — institutions in the motion picture case and governmental spending on defence in the Silicon Valley case. The partially random nature of the process is evidenced by the fact that William Shockley, one of the co-inventors of the transistor at Bell Labs in New Jersey and the founder of the first semiconductor firm, wanted to be near his mother.
SVNJ Working Paper Series , 2015
There has been a prolonged discussion in Japan, followed by various policy actions, to create an environment conducive to startups in order to accelerate innovation. While much of the policy focus until now has been on how to import or duplicate various aspects of Silicon Valley, it is now time to add another stream of discussion to the conversation: how Japanese policymakers and corporations can best make use of Silicon Valley. In order to add this new stream of conversation, it is critical to first gain a shared in-depth understanding of Silicon Valley itself as an economic ecosystem—not simply how it functions today, but how and why it developed into its current form. Only by understanding the trajectory of development over time can we project how certain changes are likely to happen in the future, and what lessons should be drawn on how to harness the ecosystem for Japan. This report provides an overview of the Silicon Valley ecosystem. It draws upon existing scholarship and original insights to derive a picture that is only partially well-known in Japan. Characteristics such as the critical role of large firms for the startup firm ecosystem, the role of Japanese firms in creating the US firms’ “open innovation” paradigm, and the severe lack of local government coordination in providing public transportation creating opportunities for disruptive startups such as Uber, are all aspects of Silicon Valley that are not well-known in Japan. This report also delves into industry-university ties in the crucial research universities of Stanford and University of California Berkeley, highlighting the multifaceted and bidirectional interactions between universities and industry that are often not captured by the common “technology licensing office”-centered view. In the final section, this report briefly reviews a representative set of challenges often cited by large Japanese firms attempting to make use of the Silicon Valley ecosystem, concluding by suggesting areas for further research.
Unravelling Silicon Valley's Innovation System from a Southern Perspective
In book: Higher Education in the World 7. Humanities and Higher Education: Synergies between Science, Technology and HumanitiesPublisher: Global University Network of Innovation, 2019
The paper explores the profound restructuring of the system of scientific and technological innovation over the last two-and-a-half decades, where the concentration and private appropriation of the means of knowledge creation and scientific and technological innovation has reached major proportions. This trend has engendered a regressive path in the advancement of knowledge, exacerbating the propensity of the world system towards crisis, putting the very material bedrock of life, work and nature at risk. The aim of this chapter is to analyse some of the fundamental features of this restructuring and capitalist development process and unravel what can be regarded as the cutting-edge capitalist innovation system with its epicentre in Silicon Valley and with increasingly important corporate subsidiaries in peripheral countries. The analysis is based on what the authors conceive to be a Southern perspective. Rather than a simple negation of the dominant, northern perspective, it implies a negation of the negation in dialectical terms, with the aim of building a comprehensive, inclusive, emancipatory and libertarian approach to the development of society's productive forces. From this alternative standpoint, Silicon Valley's innovation system is portrayed as a patenting machine, aimed at accelerating and appropriating the products of the general intellect with the overarching aim of concentrating and centralising human capital in the form of brain power, knowledge and skills.