Blog Post

We don’t need to recreate Silicon Valley

“The world’s preeminent hub for technology, Silicon Valley is a byword for innovation. Today, it is home to the headquarters of many of the world’s largest high-tech corporations, including more than thirty businesses in the Fortune 1000 as well as thousands of promising startups”. This is how Gabrielle Athanasia described Silicon Valley in her blog post titled The Lessons of Silicon Valley: A World-Renowned Technology Hub.

Silicon Valley is indeed synonymous with technological innovation, and this has seen many national and sub-national governments, ecosystem builders, innovation leaders, etc. ask the question: how can we create the next Silicon Valley? In other words, what are the combination of factors that make an innovation ecosystem vibrant, and how can this be recreated in other places?

Victor Hwang and Greg Horowitt do a great job of addressing this question in their book: The Rainforest (The Secret to Building the Next Silicon Valley). They opine that the rainforest thrives because of the way elements mix together. The rainforest is analogous to an innovation ecosystem. Some of the elements that are combined to great effect in the world’s foremost innovation center, Silicon Valley, are ideas, talent and capital.

It is increasingly becoming clear however that we do not need to recreate Silicon Valley to achieve technological innovation at scale. For instance, venture capital driven Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) has seen large investments in start-ups and early stage companies across the Americas, EMEA and Asia. Unlike Silicon Valley where ideas, talent and capital are collocated in a region, we see capital being deployed to the regions and ideas where they are needed to support innovation.

The same is true for talent. The world is increasingly connected and start-ups, scale-ups and corporations are connecting with talent across the globe to solve their local talent challenges. There is a lot more decentralization of talent, a trend which has also been aided by the coronavirus pandemic. According to Victor Hwang and Greg Horowitt, “...a viable start-up company today is a multinational corporation from the day of its founding, drawing upon the right people with the right ideas, talent and capital wherever they happen to be located”.

But this isn’t only applicable to start-ups. With respect to talents, corporations of every size are increasingly leveraging nearshore and offshore resourcing models to hire the talents they need to get work done.

Some benefits of sourcing talents remotely include:

• Improved focus on core business activities
• Access to skilled resources at scale
• Reduction in fixed costs

Do you need technology talents in your business to help move the needle? Talent Oases can help you source the right mix of talents while mitigating associated risks.

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