One of the questions I used to get asked most often when I worked at Google was: "What's the secret sauce of Silicon Valley ? What can we learn from you to improve our own tech industry ?". A recent article in Economist this month, titled "The Age of Mass Innovation", simply hits the nail on its head regarding this topic. While the piece doesn't offer a surefire recipe for successful innovation, it has brilliant examples and quotes such as this one by Sergey Brin:
“Silicon Valley doesn't have better ideas and isn't smarter than the rest of the world” but it has the edge in filtering ideas and executing them. That magic still happens and attracts people from around the world who are “bold, ambitious, determined to scale up and able to raise money here actually to do it.”
According to Siliconvalleyonline.org, over 23,000 net new firms have been created in Silicon Valley since 2000. The tiny region accounts for 10% of all US patents, absorbs 35% of all US venture capital investment and boasts a productivity rate which is 2.5 times the US average. While most people agree that an exceptional workforce combined with stellar higher education (Stanford University, UC Berkeley), highly concentrated clusters of tech companies, active social networks and a steady source of venture capital together are responsible for the success of Silicon Valley, Elon Musk offers an actual formula: "talent times drive times opportunity".
Silicon Valley is a magnet for people around the world that simply won't accept the status quo and seek ground-breaking ideas to solve big problems. America's cultural tendency to cherish and encourage individual achievement tends to be very conducive to innovation. It might be best to do the least when it comes to government policy in this regard. Nothing rivals human ingenuity as a key source of innovation.
