6 Steps for Creating the Next Global 'Silicon Valley'

Silicon Valley is a place invested with incredible myth and aspiration. It is the place of hacker-kids-turned-billionaires. It is a place where last generation's industry Goliath's are upended by the next generation's Davids. The story of the place is particularly important to governments around the world who look to the region as an economic dynamo and seat of innovation. But what does it take to create a 'Silicon Valley?'

This question is actually the subject of a lot of thinking and writing. Startup guru and UC Berkeley professor Steve Blank has given a talk called "Hidden in Plain Sight: The Secret History of Silicon Valley," which takes the story back to WWII. Guy Kawasaki, former Apple evangelist and many-times startup book author wrote a post in 2006 called "How to Kick Silicon Valley's Butt" in which he breaks it into the pieces that other places can replicate and those they can't. Y Combinator founder Paul Graham wrote an essay called "How to Be Silicon Valley" in which he argues that it's all about getting a concentration of the right people in a common spot.

For many, this is more than just an academic exercise. Around the world, countries are dealing with young populations and too few job opportunities -- a toxic mix. In these places, the attempt to create a version of Silicon Valley is not about vanity, but about opportunity.

Over the weekend, entrepreneur, scholar, and TechCrunch writer Vivek Wadhwa wrote a post about Russia's attempt to encourage an ecosystem of venture capital, seed investment and technology entrepreneurship. Wadhwa has been (and remains) skeptical of the push, but in a surprise was invited to see the country's progress first hand. In reporting back from his trip, he provides 6 steps for creating a Silicon Valley in Russia. While the piece was written specifically with Russia in mind, these tips have application around the world. Here are the points, reinterpreted for the global audience.

1. Teach entrepreneurship - to students and current workers. Wadwha is a big proponent of "nurture" in the nature v. nurture debate about entrepreneurship, but regardless of what you think whether some people are born entrepreneurs, his point is about giving people the tools to create businesses from their ideas.

2. Create an aspiration and a challenge. Kennedy's invocation to get to the moon by the end of the 1960s was one of the greatest examples of issuing an entrepreneurial challenge to society. That's the sort of challenge that can bring entrepreneurial passion out of the woodwork.

3. Invite immigrant entrepreneurs. This is an incredibly important statistic: from 1995 to 2005, 52% of Silicon Valley companies were founded by immigrants. These immigrant entrepreneurs aren't just a self-selected talent pool, but bearers of essentially different perspectives that help challenge the status quo and improve the sector as a whole.

4. Take advantage of looser patent laws. This is an interesting point. He is basically arguing that where there are looser patent laws, entrepreneurs should be building off of existing intellectual property. His point is that this sort of piggybacking can accelerate the pace of development, and ultimately makes money for the IP holders through license fees.

5. Facilitate global connections between entrepreneurs. One of the clear lessons of Silicon Valley is that a high concentration of talent engineers challenge and motivate one another. What's more, countries that have built successful tech entrepreneurship infrastructures (such as Israel) often emphasize having extremely strong global ties with Silicon Valley itself.

6. Invest in capacity-building networks. While Wadhwa is talking specifically about formal academic institution-convened networks, capacity building these days can and should include not only that but conferences, Startup Weekends, hackathons, mixers, and everything else which increases the density of social capital in an industry.

Trying to replicate the magic of any place that is great at something can sometimes be a fool's errand. That said, there is enough that is knowable about how Silicon Valley came to be and continues to remain a hub of innovation that it is worth extrapolating lessons. Ultimately, each new successful culture of innovation will spring up in its own form, and where we can help that happen, the world will be a better place for it.

Photo credit: Arend Kuester