One of the big factors in creating Silicon Valley was the Bay Area’s abundance of universities & federally-funded laboratories, and a legal prohibition on non-compete clauses in employment contracts.
Agreed. Strong universities in proximity and a solid public educational system do not hurt either.
When defense contractor Fairchild Camera and Instruments creates the subsidiary Fairchild Semiconductors and set up shop in San Jose in the 1950’s, they did it to be near Stanford, UC Berkeley and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, which were in the Bay Area.
So looking at (a) Cincinnati/Louisville/Lexington, (b)Kingston/Johnson City/Bristol, (c) Decatur/Florence/Gadsden AL, and (d) Atlanta, at (a) you have as universities: Kentucky, Louisville, Transylvania, Centre [College], Bellerman, Northern Kentucky, Kentucky State, and multiple others. For (b) you get Oak Ridge up the street along with East Tennessee State, U Tennessee and VA Tech are in close proximity, and several others close by. For (c) the selection is a bit less *but* you already have the technical side of the Redstone Arsenal and various other labs with easy access to those schools in Nashville and Birmingham. There are so many smaller schools in Atlanta in addition to GA Tech, Emory, and nearby UGA as to prevent listing them all here.
Also the guy who founded Fairchild Semiconductor used to work for Bell Labs and wanted to be as far away from them as possible.
Although I-81 connects directly to (b) and indirectly to (c), all three are far enough away to be more than a short drive or flight away, (d) not withstanding though issues about (never being able to have) a second airport will remain. And the hub at (a) is already one of the highest-ranked airports in the US apparently.
Without non-compete contracts, you had a lot of very smart engineers with managers who didn’t really see the potential of what they were making, who were free to walk out the door, take the knowledge they gained working at Fairchild and start a new company with it like Intel. And since you have all these guys in one area, it makes it easy to hire ex-Fairchild guys, and you’ve got this pipeline of really smart ambitious graduates coming out of Berkeley, Stanford and UCSF who stay in the area and then start their own companies like Atari and Silicon Graphics, and the people leaving those companies go on to found companies like Apple, nVidia, Adobe, etc...
So to make an alternate Silicon Valley happen, you need a state where non-compete contracts are banned. If you have non-competes, anybody at a company who leaves it or is pushed out effectively can’t work in the same industry.[/quote]
Appalachia is an untapped resource of talent and labor. Even unskilled labor would prosper to some extent, but there are plenty of folks 'in the hills' with the brains but not the resources to go for much higher education. Some are also highly inventive too. As for the contracts I do not know enough to speak to those points.
You need a strong public university system. You need a pipeline to be able to have people coming in and replacing the churn of people who left to found their own second generation companies.
You need a strong social safety net. People don’t cycle out of a growing industry if they’re faced with poverty if they try, you need to have a strong social safety net so that people are more able to take risks and leave the nest.
State grants and 'adjusted' loan policies for easy cash and a lot of desperate people looking for a way out might also be a winning combination.
And you need a decent DOD presence as well. Because the DOD is gonna be the first customer and that will allow an alt-Silicon Valley to grow and prosper.
Fort Knox, Fort Campbell, Oak Ridge, Redstone Arsenal, Air Force Plant 67...and those are just the major ones nearby...
With these factors in mind, the states without strong university systems and social safety nets are out. States with more “employer-friendly” laws towards non-compete contracts are out.
Appalachia, apparently...But Texas, Florida, Northern Illinois, Colorado, Arizona, and maybe even Salt Lake City would work. Play the scenario right and even Las Vegas or Reno would work.