Untitled - socium.ge

56 Pekka Himanen and Manuel CastellsIn a parallel, but related development, recombinant DNA technology wasdeveloped at Stanford University and at the University of California, SanFrancisco, in 1973–5, leading to the growth of early, leading biotechnologycompanies in the Bay Area, such as Cetus and Genentech. The process continuedover the next three decades and made the Bay Area the site of the largestconcentration of the most advanced genetic engineering companies in theworld. Similarly, in the 1990s, when computer graphics and the Internet revolutioncreated the multimedia industry, it was also in San Francisco, in theSouth of Market area, that some of the most advanced start-up companies werelocated. They later connected with the much larger Los Angeles multimediacomplex, forming what in the Californian jargon is called “Siliwood” (acombination of Hollywood and Silicon Valley). Thus, there is something inSilicon Valley (a region that, in fact, includes the entire San Francisco BayArea, beyond its original South Bay location between Stanford and San Jose)that has made it the seedbed of innovation for over half a century. What is it?Silicon Valley as a Milieu of InnovationA milieu of innovation appears when there is synergy emerging from a specificproduction complex (Castells, 1989) A production complex is formed, as in allproduction systems, by the combination of capital, labor, and raw material toprocess inputs into outputs. What studies on Silicon Valley show is that thesynergy resulting from this production system was linked to the geographicalcoincidence of specific raw material, specific capital, and specific labor(Castells and Hall, 1994; Saxenian, 1994). The specific raw material was newknowledge on information technologies. It came, to some extent, from leadinguniversities in the area, particularly Stanford and Berkeley. But it also resultedfrom the extraordinary talent that was attracted to the area, and this was somewhatserendipitous, as the case of William Shockley shows, a Nobel Prizewinner for his invention of the transistor and the grandfather of the semiconductorsrevolution in the valley, who relocated there, from Bell Laboratoriesin New Jersey, partly because his mother was living in Palo Alto. Furthermore,the innovative culture, and a critical mass of highly educated young populationin the area, provided the basis for the raw material in the form of youngminds interacting with each other, for example in the Homebrew ComputerClub, the source of the personal computer and related software development.The specific labor were the high-quality engineers, computer scientists, andscientists that the Bay Area universities were mass producing from the 1960s,overtaking the leading East Coast universities in quantity with similar quality.In addition, as soon as the industry expanded, young engineers from all overAmerica, and the world, came to work in Silicon Valley. A vast pool of talentprovided the basis for the growth of the milieu of innovation.