When someone thinks of innovation, start-ups and information technology businesses than the change is big that Silicon Valley is mentioned. Silicon Valley has grown to be an important worldwide player after World War Two when talking about information technology. The semiconductor industry is not to imagine gone from the present-day living patterns. The semiconductor is crucial everywhere, for example in smartphones and tablets. Silicon Valley lies between San Francisco and San Jose in the American state California. Next to information technology companies universities also have had their important share in the success of Silicon Valley. Think about Stanford University and the University of California in Berkeley. These universities are guaranteed high qualified scientific research to guarantee so called long term successes of technologies. The American government have carried out a lot of research on these universities. In the 90s Venture Capitalist companies discovered Silicon Valley. This have a boost to a number of start-ups. Well knows organisations such as Cisco Systems, Google, Yahoo and Apple have their main offices located in Silicon Valley.
Route 128
However, is Silicon Valley the only place in America where the information technology branch ensures innovations, start-ups and research? No!
Route 128 near Boston in the state Massachusetts looks a lot like the ‘forgotten’ Silicon Valley. Concretely Route 128 is a State Highway of about 16 kilometres long. It starts west of Boston and ends north of the city. Route 128 is half a circle. In the 60s Route 128 was the symbol of the fast growing high-tech industry. Large companies have settles here such as: Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), Data General, Polaroid, Sun Microsystems, EMC Corporation and Lotus Development. Route 128 was also purveyor of high-tech companies just outside of Boston such as DuPont, Kodak and Xerox. Boston is a city with three universities: Harvard, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the Boston University. These top universities provide a lot of scientific research in the high-tech industry. NASA is one of the big takers of research on these universities.
Alongside Route 128 investing companies have also settled to facilitate start-ups with financial stuff or to be cautious of promising innovations. Different from Silicon Valley, Route 128 doesn’t have a big informal network, the so called ‘communities’. Also the better climate of California gets mentioned why companies prefer settling in Silicon Valley then along Route 128. More that with Silicon Valley Route 128 can rely on the support of the government in terms of research and orders for production.
Route 128 or Silicon Valley in the Netherlands
As the Netherlands we could be proud of the High Tech Campus in Eindhoven. This environment is recently classified in the top 5 of most innovative places on the world. At the High Tech Campus Dutch corporate technology organisations such as Philips, Aton Origin and Océ have settled. There is also close collaboration with the Technical University of Eindhoven and the University of Tilburg inclusively the business school TiasNimbas.