How to build an entrepreneurial ecosystem? How to stimulate business creation and innovation? How to make a place an attractor of talent and ideas? These questions echo on time within the various debates, round tables, seminars, conferences and seminars each year to local development issues. And just as regularly the myth of Silicon Valley is presented as a benchmark to strive, as if the one and only true way to rispostagli questions above.
Scholars who have studied this issue more seriously widely considered converge in this way, precisely, nothing more than a myth. Today I would like to express some thoughts about it. Proceed for points, trying to outline what I believe to be the most promising avenues to boost entrepreneurship at local level. To sweep away any doubts I state that I do not believe in the existence of a "formula" winner. But I believe that we can define the guidelines, a kind of roadmap, starting with some simple principles.
Principle 1: Stop Fantasising about the Valley!
Silicon Valley is the expression of a process development based on the extraordinary combination of circumstances are unique and unrepeatable. I quote the most striking (but the list could be much longer):
a) The presence of a great industrial infrastructure focused on the aerospace and radio on which you are grafted the first major business venture. On this point return to the blog of Bradford Cross and its rich historical reconstruction of the Silicon Valley phenomenon, recoverable here.
b) liberal and open culture of California, a region that has been shaped by pioneers ready to abandon old certainties to pursue new opportunities. And of course the widespread entrepreneurial spirit of a country, the USA, where sina is small exposed to stories, "mythical" figures and business innovators such as Edison or Benjamin Franklin, and where the streets are statues dedicated to the captains of industry like Andrew Carnegie or Henry Ford.
c) Stanford and the relationship between universities and industry. The Stanford University developed since the first years of life with an orientation of openness and exchange against the industry. The University of California are also historically engaged in the promotion of science parks, technology transfer offices, incubators and investment funds (Stanford, to name one of many scandals, has grossed $ 200 million from its stake in Google!). To these are added a p olite extremely liberal towards foreign PhD. Suffice it to say that in 2008 the new companies founded or co-founded by foreign immigrants were 52% of the total. In 1998, 25%.
s) The presence of an exceptional 60 years as Fairchild Semiconductor, a pioneering research laboratory which will come out within a few years, the future founders of such giants as Intel, AMD, National Semiconductor, Kleiner Perkins and Xerox Parc, the latter organizations to turn designed to burgeon legions of entrepreneurs (the famous " fairchildren "), as shown in the figure below.
This combination of factors has set in motion a process far from linear and highly idiosyncratic. Therefore impossible to play "by design”. Ispirarsi a un modello di riferimento è quasi sempre utile e costruttivo, a patto che non si tratti di un modello utopico. Nel prossimo post cercherò di contrapporre alla chimera Silicon Valley 3 semplici idee su come avviare un percorso di costruzione dell’ecosistema graduale e “dal basso”.
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