Silicon Valley - Still Important To Tech Advances

mrspin writes "This week the The New York Times sparked a lively debate by publishing an article which argued that, when it comes to creating innovative technology, geography still matters — and that Silicon Valley is the place to be. It's certainly true that Silicon Valley, compared with other innovation hot-spots, has the much needed Venture Capital and the connections that enable money to flow from one new company to another. Want proof? ZDNet takes a look at LinkSViewer, a new web-based visual networking tool for exploring capital relationships in Silicon Valley." Is the success of Valley-area projects the result of a more creative environment, or is the cachet of the area (and the resulting money) the reason behind their success?

Comments

Reputation Matters

[Peter Trepan]

Alabama is proof. We have one of the top research hospitals in the United States. We have a whole city full of freaking rocket scientists which incidentally has the nation's highest concentration of engineers. Jimmy Wales grew up here. We had three winners on American Idol (who no one cared about until then) and lots of good local bands (who no one cares about now.) Every generation, Alabama produces enough interesting people to completely replace the asshats who are responsible for Alabama's history - but then they all move, leaving the same old rednecks in charge.

Reputation is a self-fulfilling prophecy. It's the sole reason why Alabama is still socially conservative.

Combined with a California IP law.

[Ungrounded Lightning]

The positive feedback loop is a big part of it. It produces a pool of trained people from whom you can hire the skills you need on short notice and without paying relocation expenses and "moving away from where the action is" penalties.

But another factor is a small but very important piece of IP law in California:

If an employee makes an invention, on his own time, without using company materials or resources, and it's not in the company's immediate or likely future business path, it belongs to the employee. No matter what the employment contract says. (The contracts generally explicitly include one page which IS this provision.)

The result is that people who invented something that their company wouldn't be developing could rent the building across the street and build their own startup to develop and market it. And many of them did - and did it again a couple years later - repeat for decades.

The result is that startups budded off and grew like a yeast culture.

Any other state that wants to build its own version of Silicon Valley needs to clone this provision into their own state law.

If this is done, and they can provide an alternaive to California's high crime, high tax, and oppressive political-correctness, they might see an even bigger boom in one of their major university towns.