Silicon Valley and the world’s new emerging innovation hubs

By Hira Dangol, Natasha Pokidio & William Hachiya

This case study and research provides an analysis and evaluation of the history and current Silicon Valley, comparing with other emerging startup ecosystems in the world. We are a team of three business professionals with substantial working experience. Hence, our team’s ultimate objective is to understand strengths and weaknesses of each ecosystem and apply those in real businesses, harnessing those ecosystems effectively. Furthermore, defining secret ingredients of Silicon Valley and finding replicable elements would help us nurture ecosystems in our own countries. The method of analysis includes qualitative approaches, such as digging insights through existing research papers, articles and interviews to an expert in this field, and quantitative approaches, such as comparing the number of startup outputs, early stage funding per startup, and other ratios that could be indicative of success. We purposely did not use common metrics to evaluate ecosystems across the world, because we have discovered that intangible ingredients, as well as their combination, was a key differentiator for each ecosystem. For example, an abundance of funds as a single ingredient does not necessarily lead to the success of ecosystem, because how funds correlate with other ingredients is more important than a single resource. The results of our research show mainly three things: Silicon Valley has the perfect combination of tangible and intangible ingredients; though tangibles may be replicable, intangible ingredients such as diversity level and culture built from long history may be difficult to replicate Silicon Valley is not focused on a single sector, but rather diverse sectors and it continues to be one of the world’s leading centers of innovation and technology disruption The ecosystems are evolving across the world, some of the locations are more advanced some less but the startup and innovation movement is taking place across the planet Yet, we are in a turning point of the next disruptive technology. There are many places that have the potential of becoming the next Silicon Valley, because, nowadays, robust Triple Helix (i.e. interactions of Universities, government, and industries) is seen in many ecosystems around the world. Whether it’s IoT, FinTech, or AI, whoever makes a global scale breakthrough could be the next Silicon Valley.

For more detail: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/320181023_Exploring_Global_Startup_Ecosystems_2017