A Brief Rebuttal to the Techno-Urban Fantasy that Silicon Valley can be Replicated
By all available evidence, Silicon Valley cannot be cloned. This fact, though inconvenient to policy makers and economic development strategists the world over, remains stubbornly true. The Valley’s mystique persists: a mythic land of hoodies and stock options, of nap pods and billion-dollar exits. It has become a lodestar for would-be innovation hubs. But let us dispense with fantasy: Silicon Valley is not a model. It is a historical anomaly.
In a prior article, I made the argument that Silicon Valley should not be viewed as aspirational. It is sold as a story of openness and meritocracy, but operates via exclusivity and proximity. It connects the world, while privileging those physically and socially nearest to the core. That core of wealthy, tightly networked people exists in precisely one place: the Bay Area. No other region has reproduced it, despite decades of effort, incentives, and glossy pitch decks.
Why? Because Silicon Valley is not a toolkit. It is not a set of repeatable best practices. It is a long-accumulated sediment of historical contingencies: Cold War defense contracts, Stanford’s peculiar institutional metabolism, California zoning laws, a critical mass of venture capital, and an occasional burst of luck. If the Valley remains the tech capital of the world, it is not because it followed a blueprint. It is because it happened.
If we are serious about fostering innovation—and not just gesturing toward it with airy slogans and TED-adjacent initiatives—we must understand where innovation actually comes from. It emerges from dense concentrations of expertise, capital, and know-how. Historically, this has taken many forms.
Take Josiah Wedgwood, whose 18th-century pottery enterprise in England pioneered not just ceramic techniques, but modern marketing itself. Specialization, machinery, pyrometers, and a tasteful sense of product placement – Wedgwood married art, science, and commerce into a scalable system. It was pottery, yes. But it was also proto-industrial design, logistics, and brand-building.
Or consider Taiwan. Not a Valley clone, but something sui generis: the global nexus of semiconductor manufacturing. This did not emerge from nowhere. It is the result of decades of state-supported industrial policy, engineering talent, institutional focus, and perhaps above all, patience. The result is an ecosystem so refined it makes chip fabrication look like clockwork. In reality, it’s an astonishing technical ballet.
Or, for a different flavour entirely. France and ducks. Were a Palo Alto founder to launch a startup based on duck-based culinary foams, they would find little traction. France, on the other hand, combines a deep cultural attachment to gastronomy with industrial-scale expertise in preservation, flavouring, and processing. The country is a quiet powerhouse in food tech, not because of slides in the office or co-working spaces, but because generations have honed a set of practices into something approaching national infrastructure.
These are not stories of generic innovation. They are stories of situated excellence. And they are not easily exportable. There is no software update that turns Birmingham into Wedgwood 2.0, no accelerators that transform Halifax into Hsinchu, and certainly no incubators that will make Toulouse into the next Menlo Park. Innovation cannot be downloaded. It must be cultivated – slowly, locally, and often inelegantly.
This brings us to the rhetorical sleight of hand common in “innovation policy.” The phrase “we want to build the next Silicon Valley” sounds visionary. In fact, it is vague. What exactly do policy makers hope to achieve? Employment? Wealth generation? Sectoral dominance? These are not synonymous goals, and conflating them ensures confusion.
Instead, three steps are recommended, though none of them will make headlines. First, determine the actual objective. Second, identify where local strength already exists – industry leadership, technical know-how, cultural competence. Third, reduce friction: regulatory, bureaucratic, institutional. Then wait, with discipline.
Occasionally, if a company grows large and successful enough, something remarkable happens. Its ambitious employees leave. They start new firms, often in the same industry. Support sectors follow. This is how clusters form – not from imagination, but from imitation. The Valley did not begin with unicorns. It began with Fairchild Semiconductor.
To be clear: this is not a strategy. It is a hope tempered by history. But it is more realistic than lunch-and-learns, more sustainable than open-concept real estate, and vastly cheaper than throwing public funds at vague tech dreams.
In short: no, you cannot build another Silicon Valley. And nor should you try.