Geoff Mulgan - 02.12.2011
In mid-November NESTA again helped host Silicon Valley Comes to the UK, with a flood of activities from appathons for students to design new apps for public services, to high profile events with Valley luminaries such as Reid Hoffman.
There is still a lot we can learn from Silicon Valley's continued success. For me the lessons boil down to three types of openness: openness to migrants (demonstrated in our video with some of the SVC2UK speakers when asked for their enterprise policy wish list); capital open to risk; and openness to new entrants.
Dozens of countries have tried to emulate Silicon Valley but these three types of openness turn out to be harder to copy than they appear - just look at the UK's ambivalence over immigration, and the resistance of our dominant financial institutions to long-term investment in technology (as opposed to financial innovation).
Other elements of the Silicon Valley story are also hard to replicate. Nowhere can come close to matching the scale of public investment that has been pumped in by the US Federal government since the 1940s. But it's also important to remember the time it takes for clusters to take shape. It took 20 years for the Silicon Valley model to fully form, and arguably 30 for it to really hit its stride. That's also about the time that it's taken for UK initiatives like Inmos (which for a long time was viewed as a failure) to bear fruit in the form of companies such as ARM.
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