Cloning Silicon Valley [Reflections]

The speaker was talking about how New Jersey could become the next Silicon Valley. I was skeptical, but the audience was enthusiastic. "We could be Silicon Valley!" they were thinking. · Through the years I've been a number of places that people thought could become Silicon Valley. Some have done well enough–Boston; Research Triangle Park, in North Carolina; Austin, Texas; and Cambridge, England, to name a few. Many more places have had their hopes and aspirations bear little fruit. But Silicon Valley is still the only Silicon Valley. · While the speaker was lauding the potential of New Jersey, I was remembering a time in the 1960s when I had just started my career at Bell Labs. Back then some executives started the original effort to make New Jersey into a Silicon Valley. They had put together a consortium of New Jersey research organizations and hired Fred Terman, the Stanford University dean given credit for creating Silicon Valley, to do something similar for New Jersey. · I vividly remember attending meetings where Terman outlined his vision for a New Jersey Silicon Valley. The state had the greatest concentration of engineers and scientists in the country, but he said that what New Jersey lacked was a Stanford. None of the existing universities had the necessary culture of engineering innovation. But we could create a Stanford! Terman proposed a new graduate university, making use of all the talent the state had. He said that the new university would have immediate credibility and that universities were like cathedrals in small towns; when seen from a distance only the high spires were apparent, and New Jersey already had those high spires in its famous engineers and scientists. I was thrilled. "We could be Silicon Valley!" I thought.