UK Government plans to create a "Silicon Valley" in London

Are you a government bureaucrat desperate to leaven all the recent talk of cutbacks and austerity with a touch of high-tech fairy dust? Enjoy the idea of hobnobbing with exciting personalities like Steve Ballmer and Mark Hurd? Follow my simple guide and your country can also enjoy the limitless prosperity and social harmony with which the technology industry has blessed California!<p>First, you'll need a name. It has to start with the word 'Silicon', even if the only silicon that will be present comes stamped with the Intel logo. Next, choose a geographic feature. Unfortunately, the best geographic features have already been claimed. May I suggest "Silicon Muskeg"?<p>Now, if you visit the actual Silicon Valley, you will see a lot of office buildings. Ample supply of office space is <i>the</i> reason Silicon Valley is a success. So, the first thing you're going to need is a nice big, empty space to build offices. Lots of them. Try to find an economically depressed area, far from the places educated workers live (cheap!) and miles from public transit. Make sure this area is zoned so that only large, expensive cubicle farms and parking lots will be built, as this is the most efficient use of space. No services are necessary, as the people working here can simply drive into the city if they require food or drink.<p>Also, it is vital that your new offices be supplied with fiber-optic Internet service. Rare and difficult as this may be to provide, Internet service is what separates your mind-bending city of the future from the primitive hovels your country's technology industry now inhabits.<p>No replica of Silicon Valley would be complete without tenants! And so, your final task is to fill these offices with the industries that define the dynamism and forward-thinking spirit of Silicon Valley: IBM, Microsoft, Intel, and Dell! Don't waste your time on small fry: Fortune 500 only, please. It matters not if your new offices are filled with call centers and rebate-processing facilities, because the very <i>soul</i> of technology will leach from the telephones and TPS reports, permeating the landscape with the pure essence of innovation.<p>So huzzah, dear bureaucrat, and godspeed!

Our pg has, of course, had much to say about the feasibility of this kind of thing:<p>* <a href="http://www.paulgraham.com/siliconvalley.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.paulgraham.com/siliconvalley.html</a><p>* <a href="http://www.paulgraham.com/startuphubs.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.paulgraham.com/startuphubs.html</a><p>* <a href="http://www.paulgraham.com/maybe.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.paulgraham.com/maybe.html</a> (a proposed recipe for how to do maybe create a new startup hub; that's actually somewhat more modest than what the tc article describes)<p>The most salient quote from those articles, IMO: "Of course, a would-be silicon valley faces an obstacle the original one didn't: it has to compete with Silicon Valley."<p>I would note that if the UK are serious about this "entrepeneur visa" then that could get very interesting. Currently I can't imagine fighting through the federal paperwork required to start a company in California if I weren't already an American. Should this hub nucleate properly I can imagine most non-UK non-US citizens vastly preferring dealing with UK immigration to what has to be a frustrating US system. (Any non-UK non-US folks care to comment more informedly on this?)<p>And real estate is stupidly expensive in London, so they're halfway to Silicon Valley already.<p>[Edit: formatting]

If they're serious, and it sounds like they are, I'd suggest two more changes that weren't mentioned in the article:<p>(1) An employee in the UK can currently be required to keep working at a company for 3 months after giving notice. This should be shortened.<p>(2) Make most non-competes unenforceable. This is a very under-appreciated reason why silicon valley prospers.

When asked can Chile make a Silicon Valley by pouring money into it?, the Chilean minister of economy speaking at Stanford responded that unlike other countries (such as Russia, and now UK) Chile will try the following instead of pouring money into it: 1. Create Role Models (Young Chilean entrepreneurs that succeed) 2. Reform the laws (bankruptcy and immigration laws) 3. Invest in Universities to promote technology 4. Start networking programs with Silicon Valley (for example they brought a bunch of their entrepreneurs here to work for a while, and are taking some entrepreneurs from here to mix the cultures).<p>In general he also said that they need to remove the negative view of failure somehow, which doesn't exist in silicon valley, but they haven't figured out how to approach this one yet.

I really like the comment:<p><pre><code> &#62; “Facebook will create a permanent home in East London for &#62; their Developer Garage programme” – hmm, that’s news to us! &#62; [...] &#62; Dave Nattriss &#62; Secretary &#62; Facebook Developer Garage London </code></pre> I wonder how that happened.

(copied from the dup'd thread)<p>Why this won't work: You can't build a startup cluster to "renew an area".<p>It doesn't work like that. Old Street works because the location is decent (safe and well connected), it's cheap and the other companies there. The area has to attract people who want to work there and you can't artificially build that.<p>The location they're proposing put this new tech area goes through the area known as "murder mile". Yes it's cheap, but it's high crime rate means startups aren't going to locate there. It would be like trying to build a startup cluster in the Bronx because it's near the NY startup community.

Thrilled to see more investment money for London. It's so often overlooked compared to the rest of the UK.<p>I see lots of people desperately trying to push startups/startup culture up here in Edinburgh, meanwhile everyone leaves for London or expects you to relocate to London.

Love the sentiment, but I'm not sure they're going about it in the right way. Of course any attention and funding is better than none, but instead of getting McKinsey to advise someone or open a few offices in East London I would much rather:<p>* UK GOV creates a stupidly attractive tax and investment climate so that VCs are practically falling over themselves to invest in UK companies. The EIS scheme and VCT schemes are ok, but they could make these 10x more attractive. * Create jaw-dropping incentives for startups who deliver on what the UK GOV want, basically exporting services or creating jobs. Those kinds of companies should be afforded amazing incentives such as little to no tax for x years, no crazy 12% benefits to pay employees and how about little to no paperwork. * Perhaps some type of matched-investment scheme, where UK GOV will match investment from private angels or VC's * I am extremely encouraged to see that the gov is thinking about opening up procurement to small businesses. I fear that this won't happen in a timely manner and will face extreme hurdles. It is virtually impossible to get on the supplier list of the gov now, and even if you as a small hosted startup managed to pull of such a feat the first thing the local IT bod would ask for is SAS70 Type II compliance because that is government mandated. It seems crazy to us, being a UK startup, that one of the least likely customers would be our own government. You'd think they should be <i>mandated</i> to buy from small British companies in the spirit of helping your own economy.<p>It is really difficult to create a climate of risk taking that is evident in the valley which is fairly critical to this whole endeavor, I don't know how one manages to do that. But I sincerely hope someone manages to find out.<p>There just isn't the same tolerance for risk here in the UK and so the only mechanism I can see to break this scenario is to offer out of order incentives.

This is a nice idea but I believe is in the wrong location and the government has missed an opportunity. London simply has far too expensive housing and is too crowded and a lot of smart people won't live there. Silicon Fen in near Cambridge also has very high housing costs. A UK silicon valley needs to happen where its cheap to live, geeks actually want to live there, and there are decent transport links to London. I think a better tactic would be to electrify the Midland Mainline to make the trains to/from the north faster. Then you could make tech hubs in places like Nottingham (which is a fun place for 20-somethings to go out AND has cheap family housing too) or Sheffield (ditto and has rock climbing on the doorstep as well). Its ridiculous how so much tech work in the UK is concentrated in the crowded expensive south-east, and I believe an enlightened government would try to capitalise on the talent in the rest of the UK.

Any votes for Silicon Ditch? "Silicon Roundabout" is one name that has stuck for the tech cluster around the ugly traffic circle in the Old Street area of Shoreditch, East London. I think "Silicon Ditch" is catchier and maybe articulates the British penchant for self-deprecation better...

It's hard to express how angry this makes me feel.<p>They've just supposedly slashed public spending which will result in the loss of thousands of public sector jobs - mainly in the less affluent north - and now they're planning to invest some of the 'savings' made from that action into the already over-invested south. Taking from the poor to give to the wealthy.<p>There are cities in the UK other than London. Birmingham and Manchester for instance.<p>I am seething.

The problem is that you can't "create" Silicon Valley.

link to full article: <a href="http://eu.techcrunch.com/2010/11/04/uk-government-plans-east-london-tech-cluster-startup-visa-review-of-ip-law-200-million-in-finance-what/" rel="nofollow">http://eu.techcrunch.com/2010/11/04/uk-government-plans-east...</a>

It would be refreshing.... the US is far too restrictive with it's Visas.