Legacy's bid for the Dome has generated too many glib parallels
with Silicon Valley
Paul MasonOpinion
The successful Legacy bid for the Dome was hyped to the public
as "Britain's own Silicon Valley".
The bid promises 14,000 jobs and 1,000,000 sq ft of cheap office
space, hopefully with some broadband access. But Silicon Valley it
is not.
The real Silicon Valley was founded in 1953 when Stanford
University decided to turn some of its land into a business park.
Mr Hewlett and Mr Packard were among the first to move in, and the
rest is history.
The Silicon Valley formula consists of risk-taking venture
capitalists, high-tech centres of academic excellence, plus the
research and development facilities of the world's biggest
technology companies.
It is not enough that these are co-located.
The real chemistry comes from what sociologists have described
as the "dense social networks" that link these three kinds of
institution.
According to California folklore, in the early days, even
competitors would phone each other up for technical advice. And
ideas that transformed IT over the past 30 years were hatched in
the legendary drinking haunts of computing's pioneers.
Job mobility and a spate of mergers also spawned another
phenomenon: engineers changed jobs and companies changed technology
strategies, so fast that people became more loyal to technologies
than to individual firms.
This. in turn, sharpened California's appetite for spin-offs.
Paul Mackun, a Silicon Valley historian, writes:
"A small coterie of employees in a firm, dissatisfied with their
current place of employment, would gather after work to tinker
around with some of their own ideas. They would then develop a
business plan, acquire funds from venture capitalists and seek
advice from local academic sources. If they succeeded, they were
heroes."
Mackun goes on to point out the Silicon Valley formula could not
be repeated, even in favourable circumstances of the Route 128 area
around Boston, Massachusetts.
Most of the physical circumstances were the same.
What was different was culture: "In direct opposition to Silicon
Valley's reliance on risk-taking and partnerships is eastern
Massachusetts' emphasis on decorum, convention and
self-reliance."
This brings us to the key reason why it will be hard for the
Dome to replicate Silicon Valley. Think of the City with its old
boy/barrow boy networks; think of our venerable universities; think
of the sales and service-based operations of the IT companies
stationed along the M4 corridor: which does it sound more like -
Boston or San Francisco?
As our interview with Professor Andy Hopper shows (p60), there
are real echoes of the Silicon Valley experience happening in
Cambridge. Spin- off rather than start up is the order in Britain's
emerging biotech and telecoms hub-based Silicon.
Meanwhile Europe's nearest thing to Silicon Valley is Eire,
where tax regulations aimed at inward investment, combined with a
highly-educated workforce and modern telecoms backbone have made
the small country the world's biggest software exporter.
Let's wish the new Dome well - but warn against hype that says
co-location was what made Silicon Valley. It's about culture. And
maybe the world's wannabe new Palo Altos have to accept that, when
they made Silicon Valley, they broke the mould.