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Silicon Valley and Finland 59informational economy, the symbolic level of products has become more andmore important. In fact, increasingly, people buy the symbolic experiencerelated to a product. Silicon Valley marketing companies, such as theMcKenna Group, realized this before others and understood how to makebrands of such complicated products as high-tech information technology. TheMcKenna Group was the company that made Intel and Apple into globalbrands.Silicon Valley is also based on its social fabric. Once the milieu was constituted,in the 1960s, the role of social networks of engineers and entrepreneurswas essential in consolidating it and in assuring its internal mobility and thecross-fertilization of innovation, as research by Anna Lee Saxenian (1994) hasshown. A triple supporting structure for new entrepreneurs – high-tech partnercompanies, an inheritance of the experience of successful entrepreneurs, andthe actual services for turning ideas into businesses – makes Silicon Valley anefficient machine. The result is a very fast transformation from an idea to abusiness with venture capital, legal and marketing capabilities, ready to link tothe global financial markets through an initial public offering.As Richard Gordon (1984) has analyzed in his pioneer research on SiliconValley, around this territorially concentrated milieu, global networks of innovationlinked up with Silicon Valley, making it a node in a global system ofinnovation. The ability of Silicon Valley companies to tap into the vast technologicaland labor resources of the entire planet came from their capacity touse networking and networking technologies earlier than any other firms, forthe simple reason that they were inventing and producing these technologies.The production of network technologies favored the networking of the productionprocess around the world. Once synergy was assured, the process keptfeeding itself, as greater speed of innovation led to increased capital, labor, andknowledge embodied in talent attracted to Silicon Valley.A final important element must be added to explain why Silicon Valley isso powerful, and that is its ability to be open to ideas from around the world.None of the “Fairchild Eight” was from California. Of the Eight, Jean Hoerniwho made the breakthrough innovation of the planar process – the cornerstoneof modern semiconductors manufacturing – was from Switzerland, andEugene Kleiner, one of the key people in establishing the Valley venture capitalmarket, was Austrian. Andy Grove, one of the founders of Intel, was fromHungary. Of the inventors of the microprocessor, Ted Hoff was born on theEast Coast and Federico Faggin was Italian. The four founders of SunMicrosystems were from Germany (Andreas Bechtolsheim), India (VinodKhosla), and elsewhere in the US (Bill Joy and Scott McNealy). Jerry Yang,the co-founder of Yahoo!, is Taiwanese. Solectron’s two key people were RoyKusumoto and Winston Chen, the former of Japanese heritage and the latterfrom Taiwan.