“Could you reproduce Silicon Valley elsewhere, or is there something unique about it?” the venture capitalist Paul Graham asked in a much-quoted keynote address at Xtech back in 2006. Graham then went on to describe the key ingredients (a great university, an attractive town, smart people, youth, a tolerance for eccentricity and different thinking, and a cluster of other start-ups) that make Silicon Valley the unique ecosystem for entrepreneurial innovation that it is — and that differentiate it from its would-be imitators and competitors.
My team at the Martin Prosperity Institute recently asked a similar, if slightly cheekier, question: “How many Silicon Valleys could the world possibly contain?” After gathering as many of the cities, groups of cities, or regions across the globe that have been compared, contrasted, or branded as Silicon-something (and not surprisingly, there were a lot), the MPI team mapped and tabulated the results.
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