Selling Silicon Valley: Frederick Terman's Model for Regional Advantage

Stuart W. Leslie and Robert H. Kargon

Business History Review, 1996, vol. 70, issue 4, 435-472

Abstract: This paper explores the origins of the Silicon Valley model for regional economic development, and attempts to deploy this model elsewhere in the United States and abroad. Frederick Terman, Stanford's provost, first envisioned its unique partnership of academia and industry, and trained the first generation of students who effected it. He patiently cultivated an aggressively entrepreneurial culture in what he called “the newly emerging community of technical scholars.” Beginning in the 1960s, business groups elsewhere set out to build their own versions of Silicon Valley, some enlisting the assistance of Terman and his proteges. After discussing the emergence of the Stanford-Silicon Valley effort, the paper examines in detail the New Jersey Institute of Science and Technology, an effort led by Bell Laboratories; the Graduate Research Center of the Southwest and the SMU Foundaton for Science and Engineering in Dallas, Texas; and the Korea Advanced Insitute of Science and Technology, Terman's last and arguably most successful attempt. The paper discusses the reasons for the difficulties in creating new versions, and suggests explanations for the apparent success of the Korean experiment.

Date: 1996
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (22)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.cambridge.org/core/product/identifier/ ... type/journal_article link to article abstract page (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cup:buhirw:v:70:y:1996:i:04:p:435-472_04

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Business History Review from Cambridge University Press Cambridge University Press, UPH, Shaftesbury Road, Cambridge CB2 8BS UK.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Kirk Stebbing ().