While everyone in Quebec and Ontario were doing the shake-rattle-and-roll, the Silicon Valley establishment was playing host to Russia’s President Medvedev.
Apparently having your economy rely solely on exporting oil and mafia dons isn’yt considered sound economic policy so Medvedev got his buddy Ivan Danko to show him around the at likes of Twitter and Cisco.
In case you’ve been living in Siberia and haven’t heard, Russia wants to build its own Silicon Valley from scratch in a town outside of Moscow. So we guess Medvedev was asking around for the “how to” manual.
This reminded us of a brief discussion we had over at the C100 website a few weeks back. You can check out the comments over there, but we’ve also reposted here to continue to spur a bit of debate…
Does Canada need its own Silicon Valley?
Tuesday, June 1, 2010 at 03:37AM
OK, I’m going to pull the pin and lob a rhetorical grenade to get a discussion going…
Have you head of Skolkovo, Russia? No? Apparently it is somewhere near Moscow and is the future home of Russia’s Silicon Valley. What? You don’t believe it? Well some US investors sure do, to the tune of $250 million. And this isn’t the only government backed innovation center that is being built from the ground up. There may be a Silicon Valley being built up in Russia but the Dubai has its sites firmly set to be the 21stSilicon Oasis. Century’s
Both these locations have or are attracting talented engineers. Both of these locations have or are attracting massive amounts of capital.
And they aren’t the only two countries that are trying to build their own flavor of Silicon Valley. There are probably a dozen similar projects in a dozen countries around the world. But one country that isn’t embarking on its own Silicon Valley master plan is Canada.
If a US PE can come up with 250 million reasons why Russia will successfully build the next hub of innovation, surely Canada, with its improving investment climate and its refreshing lack of mafia domination could convince investors to put some green in the Great White North.
Is Canada missing the boat? Does it need to create a chilly Silicon Valley somewhere near Alert in order to compete in the global high-tech market?
Discuss…..