GOOD MORNING!We hope you are progressing quite well with your studies. ON SILICON VALLEYS SUCCESS-ENTREPRENEURIAL NEWS:Californias Silicon Valley is much envied From Hewlett-Packard to Google, from Apple to Intel - the many start-ups created in Silicon Valley have helped define the modern world. The area - surrounding San Francisco Bay in northern California - has arguably been the worlds supreme entrepreneurial hotspot, generating a seemingly endless supply of new technologies, new companies, and huge wealth. But now, other places around the world are trying to create start-up clusters of their own. Next week, the BBC will start a series looking at other areas trying to replicate Silicon Valleys success. Ahead of this, we asked a range of experts from Silicon Valley why they thought the area had been so successful - and what advice they would give to those keen to emulate its Business or technical failure is considered experience” Silicon Valley is a unique amalgam of academia, private sector and US government research investment coupled with a population of (serial) entrepreneurs. It began with Fred Terman, Provost at Stanford, who recognised that federal investment in research led to the winning of WW2. He leveraged this to expand the engineering department at Stanford by a factor of three and encouraged graduates, such as Hewlett and Packard, to start new companies. Continue reading the main story Vint Cerf; Chief internet evangelist at Google What results is a steady stream of well-trained engineers, business people, marketers, researchers; a vibrant venture capital community; a highly available stock market appetite for stock flotations; and people with experience in business, including how and why business failures happen. Importantly, business or technical failure is considered experience and not an indelible mark of incompetence. The Valley is a small place. People know each other: they have worked with one another, or managed or worked for one another. Forming a new business is pretty easy under Californian law. It is altogether a remarkable, vibrant and innovative culture that continues to produce dividends decade after decade. Michael S Malone, technology journalist and author The Valley didnt come freighted with old attitudes and cultures” Silicon Valley is not so easy to replicate. One reason is time: the Valley is also the oldest high-tech community on Earth. Begun in the Packard garage seventy-five years ago, it has had more than seven decades to figure out every nuance and fill every niche of the digital world. Michael S Malone;Academic, journalist, broadcaster and author A second reason is location: Silicon Valley, as Santa Clara Valley, was a largely unpopulated agricultural area at the end of WW2, with cheap land and a great city nearby. It benefited greatly from the migration of Americans, especially veterans, west to California and into the new jobs in aerospace and electronics. The third reason is infrastructure: there are few places anywhere that offered a full range of educational institutions from trade schools, to mid-level colleges, to the two great universities, Stanford and Berkeley. All of these factors combined to create a fourth reason for the success, and singularity, of Silicon Valley: culture. The Valley didnt come freighted with old attitudes and cultures, but was free to create one of its own: risk-taking, multi-cultural, meritocratic and most of all, entrepreneurial. The secret to Silicon Valleys success? We know how to fail and we have been doing it for decades. Failure is what fuels and renews this place. Failure is the foundation for innovation. Failure is essential because even the cleverest of innovations - and businesses - fail a few times before they ultimately succeed. Consider Google: at least half a dozen other companies tried to turn search into a business, but Google was the first to crack the code and turn search into a huge business. And even when companies succeed, the only way to survive in the long term is to flee into the future by relentlessly innovating. Apple all but killed off the iPod at its peak by turning the iPods music function into a feature incorporated into the iPhone when it was introduced in 2007. Continue reading the main story Paul Saffo;Technology forecaster and managing director of San Francisco-based Discern Analytics Has written for a wide range of publications including The Harvard Business Review, Fortune, Wired and Newsweek Apple happily killed its own product because if Apple hadnt done so, another competitor would have done it for them. Failure is what makes Silicon Valleys success to hard to replicate. Would-be competitors only see, and try to copy, the Valleys success. But to succeed you need an ecology of fearless players from venture capitalists to banks, suppliers and myriad other supporting businesses unafraid to risk all by helping with often flakey and unpredictable start-ups. So if you want to be the next Silicon Valley, dont copy our success. Learn to support and encourage novel and ultimately successful failure. Vivek Wadhwa, entrepreneur, academic and author What really makes the Valley tick is its culture of risk-taking” Regions all over the world have tried to copy Silicon Valley, but none has succeeded. Thats because they have focused on trying to recreate its venture capital system, universities, or start-up incubators. Continue reading the main story Vivek Wadhwa Academic, researcher, writer and entrepreneur He has written for publications such as the Washington Post, the Wall St Journal, and Business Week Vivek Wadhwa What they dont realise is that what really makes the Valley tick is its culture of risk-taking and information sharing; people-to-people networks; openness to new ideas; and diversity - more than half of its innovators are foreign-born. It also helps that Silicon Valley has excellent weather, is close to mountains and the ocean, and has a myriad of state-park hiking trails - these help foster a culture of optimism, openness, tolerance, and sharing. These are the ingredients that cant easily be recreated. Venture capital only follows innovation, it goes where the opportunities for building wealth are, it doesnt create new opportunities. So this shouldnt be the starting point in attempts to build an innovation ecosystem. Any region wanting to build its version of Silicon Valley should focus on its people and culture. Judy Estrin, serial entrepreneur Silicon Valley is a unique combination of universities, companies, venture investors, culture, weather, all sorts of things that come to play to create Silicon Valley. Typically if you look at the places where you have entrepreneurial ecosystems, there are at least two universities. Those students carry ideas into the world. Continue reading the main story Judy Estrin- Former chief technology officer of tech giant Cisco A serial entrepreneur whos been involved with the founding of eight companies so far You need to have at least one or two big companies because often entrepreneurs are people who work in a big company and come up with an idea. The big company rejects it because its not part of the large firms objectives. As a result, the entrepreneur leaves that company and does it on their own. So you need big companies to provide both talent and ideas and infrastructure and then you need the right policies and incentives. Its about making sure that you dont have policies that are making it too hard to start a business. So its a combination of things that you can try to reproduce Silicon Valley. Will you get exactly Silicon Valley? No. But you might get the equivalent of that entrepreneurial ecosystem, but for a different area - maybe for healthcare, maybe for the food industry, maybe for farming.----------------------Courtesy of BBC News
Posted on: Mon, 10 Feb 2014 07:30:44 +0000
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