Over the past few decades, Silicon Valley has been such a powerful engine for entrepreneurship in technology that, all too often, it is considered to be some kind of panacea. Corporate executives seek to inject “Silicon Valley DNA” into their cultures, and policy makers point to venture-funded entrepreneurship as a solution for all manner of problems.
This is a dangerous mindset. The Silicon Valley model, for all of its charms, was developed at a specific time, for a specific industry, which was developing a specific set of technologies. While it can offer valuable lessons for other industries and other problems, the model is not universally applicable.
