1 Response » to “Understanding Silicon Valley: The Anatomy of an Entrepreneurial Region”

1. Anonymous says:

   July 15, 2010 at 2:34 am

   At the center of all questions about the Valley lies the matter of innovation-for the Valley occasionally appears like a perpetual innovation machine. I say “innovation” rather than simply “invention,” because innovation, to me, means invention implemented. And I have grudgingly come to realize that invention is often the easy part of innovation. The hard part is usually the implementation. Here I was particularly interested in Stuart Leslie’s well-chosen quotation from a letter of Frederick Terman. Terman was the Stanford University dean who played godfather to Hewlett Packard and so many other early start-ups in the Valley. When he left the university to work on radar during World War II, he wrote back to a colleague at Stanford, “I had never before realized the amount of work required to make a device ready for manufacture after one had a good working model.” It was a lesson he clearly learned well as he guided young Stanford graduates to innovative success.
   Rating: 4 / 5