A fairly common tech blogger topic is asking rhetorically if a specific mid-size city with more than three start-ups could be the next Silicon Valley. Using The Rainforest’s guide to the factors that create start-up innovation can help answer that question.
Via The Rainforest: The Secret to Building the Next Silicon Valley – IndieReader Blogger snark aside, this was one of the most thoughtful and informative books I’ve read for IR.
Note to self: add to reading list.
Once upon a time, weather forecasting consisted of receiving a telegram from someone a hundreds of miles upwind from you, describing the weather there. The modern equivalent of “Will X become the new Silicon Valley?” would be to look to what people in high tech had been saying about X ten or twenty years ago.
Eleven years ago, I heard “the 128 corridor” mentioned in technology circles (like biotech and nanotech, not web/computer) as a baby Silicon Valley. Now Boston is right up there with Silicon Valley for start-ups. A company that I interviewed at the other week that does Big Data for medical applications was spun off from its parent company – twelve years ago. You get the idea.
This also applies to competitive technology: iRobot, maker of the Roomba, destroyer of roadside bombs, and creator of the “virtual boss” is located ten minutes up the road from Talon. Talon was created back in the ’70s and ’80s to destroy roadside bombs; in 1987 (IIRC), it was spun off from its parent company.
Obviously, predicting where the next Silicon Valley will be is different from actively trying to create it, but the former is done by looking back to what sci-fi type things people were doing in that area in the last few decades.