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Articles - Publication Date 5.1.2000
Hot Competition For High Tech
Communities worldwide aspire to be the next Silicon Valley or Rte. 128 corridor.
By William H. Miller
Make the 30-mile trip from downtown Washington to Dulles International Airport and you come upon a curious sight. Once you get beyond the city's notorious Beltway and merge onto the Dulles Access Road, you enter what not long ago was bucolic northern Virginia countryside complete with grazing cows. Now it's a corridor of modernistic office buildings adorned with names of Internet-related, telecommunications, and other high-technology companies. One structure in particular grabs your attention-an arresting wedge of glass and steel shaped like a giant slab of pie balanced on its point. It is the home of Virginia's Center for Innovative Technology.
And there, only scant yards away from this testament to the 21st century, is a vestige of the 19th -- an abandoned barn.
The juxtaposition of the old and new symbolizes the rapid emergence of the Washington Metropolitan Statistical Area as a world-class center of high tech. Yes, Washington! The ultimate government town. Yet its MSA, which also includes a corridor of biotechnology and other high-tech firms along I-270 in suburban Maryland, by some counts now has more high-tech workers than federal employees.
Want another surprise? Consider New York City, the mecca of finance, media, and entertainment. Yet the city's hottest new industry is high technology -- notably more than 4,000 software and systems-integration firms that have clustered in renovated factory buildings in the Flatiron District of Manhattan. The area, dubbed "Silicon Alley," is projected to be the home of more than 100,000 so-called new-media jobs this year.
Washington and New York are not unique. Scores of other U.S. MSAs similarly are emerging as bustling centers of high tech. Until the last few years, only two communities truly could claim that designation: California's fabled Silicon Valley and the Rt. 128 corridor outside Boston.
Nor is the trend limited to the U.S. Throughout the world, countless other communities are riding the high-tech wave. If New York City is a surprise, so must be Tokyo. Its Silicon Alley equivalent is "Bit Valley" -- a play on Shibuya, one of Tokyo's youngest, hippest towns, whose name stems from shibu (bitter) in Japanese.
But the list includes a vast range of other locations: metropolises such as Hong Kong and Singapore, rural Scotland, the unlikely island of Sardinia, a site amid the olive groves of the French Riviera, and even third-world Costa Rica.
Trading on the success of the Silicon Valley original, many of the communities have adopted the words "silicon," "valley," or a variation, in naming their centers. Keith Dawson, a Westford, Mass., marketing consultant, has listed no fewer than 89 such names, including: Automation Alley in Oakland County, Mich.; Billy Can Valley in Arnhem Land, Australia; Silicon Bayou in Lake Charles, La.; Silicon Bog in the Irish midlands and Silicon Fen in Cambridge, England; and Silicon Orchard in the Wenatchee Valley, Washington. At least 10 locations in the U.S. call themselves Silicon Prairie.
"It all started with Silicon Valley," says Dawson, "and all the Silicon Something follow-ons had some relationship to making chips. But by 1996, calling yourself Silicon Something was just a shorthand way of saying 'We're a tech center, or want to be.'"
Just what is a tech center? The definition has moved far beyond that of a location for chipmaking. Now the term also embraces telecommunications, information technology (IT), computer hardware and software, other electronics manufacturing, pharmaceuticals, and biotechnology.
Few communities don't want to be a tech center. Explains Michaela Platzer, vice president of research for the American Electronics Assn., Washington: "High-tech companies are very desirable to have as part of your economic base. They're environmentally friendly, they bring in tax revenue, and they pay well -- more than $50,000 a year for the average high-tech worker. It's no wonder that [communities] a
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"It all started with Silicon Valley and all the Silicon Something follow-ons had some relationship to making chips.
Keith Dawson, a Westford, Mass., marketing consultant
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