Silicon Valley, Boston, and the Importance of Social Density

Despite the power of the internet to accelerate communication and connect people across greater distances than ever before, social density - the depth and diversity of connections in a geographically concentrated area - still has incredible power to determine business innovation and success.

Yesterday in my post about the Huffington Post's Philanthropy Game Changers, I noticed that six out of the ten participants were based in the San Francisco Bay Area. There is a selection bias towards technology in the nominees, which explains the concentration to some extent, but that just brings up the question of how the Bay Area became the place where technology innovation is concentrated in the first place.

There's a great historical piece today on TechCrunch about how Silicon Valley became the leading light that it is, and in particular, why Boston - arguably the technology leader for most of the second half of the 20th century - slowly slipped behind northern California as an innovation hub.

The author's contention is that while Boston still has incredible resources, the decentralized networked community of innovators in Silicon Valley gave it an edge that allowed it to leapfrog the more top-down, 20th century industrial organized technlogy of the Northeast.

There are fascinating lessons here for social innovators about how to foster the sort of social density that gives certain regions significant comparative advantage. This is what the Hub is all about; and it's also what will or won't make things like the Unreasonable Institute work.

Photo: oskay