Cloning Silicon Valley - David Rosenberg

Despite the international market downturn technology based companies still lead world industry. Despite the dotcom crash Silicon Valley boasts more millionaires than anywhere on the planet. Cloning Silicon Valley locates those businesses and locations which will lead the next generation of technological advancement and business innovation.

Technology underpins all post-industrial economies - which is why virtually every developed country in the world today, and not a few under-developed ones, aspires to build its own high tech industry using California's Silicon Valley as its model.

But creating a technology economy - one where indigenous entrepreneurs and companies are developing, producing and marketing their own products - is a difficult and delicate undertaking. High tech is less an industry than a culture, and one that thrives in concentrations where venture capital, entrepreneurs and talented personnel can work closely together.

This book explores the creation of successful concentrations of high-tech industry. Is the California model something that can be copied successfully? Who has succeeded and why? Could the high tech industry thrive if dispersed? These questions are answered by exploring the roles of government, management, the educational system, and the capital markets. The book also addresses the more amorphous but critical cultural imperatives that produce the fast-moving, entrepreneurial culture in which high tech thrives.

At the centre of the book are profiles of six Silicon Valley imitators. David Rosenberg describes the approaches to building a technology industry, and details the opinions and evaluations of entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, government officials and academics who have experienced the phenomenon in their home countries and in California.