Customer Reviews

Understanding Silicon Valley: The Anatomy of an Entrepreneurial Region (Stanford Business Books)

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

One of the elements of a successful technical history is how often you refer back to it. Since this a compilation of essays by a series of authors each writing a chapter the quality varies. However it's worth buying just for the essays about the Military History of the Valley by Stuart Leslie and the Origins of Production Networks by AnnaLee Saxenian.

Each time I need to expalin what technology clusters are about, I quote the authors of one of the chapters: "A Flexible Recycling" by S. Evans and H. Bahrami. They explain that the ingredients of entrepreneurial high-tech regions are.
- Universities and research centers of a very high caliber.
- An industry of venture capital (i.e. financial institutions and private investors).
- Experienced professionals in high tech.
- Service providers such as lawyers, head hunters, public relations and marketing specialists, auditors, etc.
- Last but not least, an intangible yet critical component: a pioneering spirit which encourages an entrepreneurial culture.
The book is full of great data points!

At the center of all questions about the Valley lies the matter of innovation-for the Valley occasionally appears like a perpetual innovation machine. I say "innovation" rather than simply "invention," because innovation, to me, means invention implemented. And I have grudgingly come to realize that invention is often the easy part of innovation. The hard part is usually the implementation. Here I was particularly interested in Stuart Leslie's well-chosen quotation from a letter of Frederick Terman. Terman was the Stanford University dean who played godfather to Hewlett Packard and so many other early start-ups in the Valley. When he left the university to work on radar during World War II, he wrote back to a colleague at Stanford, "I had never before realized the amount of work required to make a device ready for manufacture after one had a good working model." It was a lesson he clearly learned well as he guided young Stanford graduates to innovative success.