Abstrakt des Buchbeitrags: “Why are regions like Silicon Valley (SV) so successful? A substantial body of prior research examines Silicon Valley from a number of lenses, including sociological aspects of culture and network formation (Saxenian, 1994), historical perspectives utilizing firm genealogy (Christensen, 1992) or case studies of individual firms (Battelle, 2005). Only a fraction of related studies (which can be seen as a sub- stream of comparative entrepreneurship research) draw findings from high-tech regions in more than one country, notably studies in economic geography based on clustering approaches (Sternberg, 2010). Surprisingly, only a narrow but steady research stream has attempted to directly address the challenge of Silicon Valley replication (Gilson, 1999; Leslie, 2001; Armour and Cumming, 2004; Rosenberg, 2002) or to directly compare SV to other regions (Suzuki et al., 2002), or both (Isaak, 2009). So can one identify measurable characteristics that are prerequisites (e.g., Amorós et al., 2013; Vogel, 2013)? Can Silicon Valley actually be replicated? Conventional wisdom suggests that it is not feasible to replicate the experience of the Bay Area elsewhere, yet no consensus has been reached in the research community. Is Silicon Valley more a result of planning than of accidental good fortune? In this chapter, we embark on a journey to the Valley by contrasting the authors’ most recent experiences in the Bay Area based on many impressions, several in- depth interviews, field notes and observations with hypotheses on why or why not one can replicate the Valley based on prior work by Isaak (2009). Our findings cast new light on a vibrant debate of how to replicate Silicon Valley. While presenting a theoretically and empirically grounded case for our hypotheses, systematic empirical testing of the hypotheses is left for future research.”
