Oct 21, 2012

AnnaLee Saxenian Comments on New York City's Goal of Being the Next Silicon Valley

From the Associated Press

NYC sees progress in quest to become tech capital

By Jennifer Peltz, Associated Press

NEW YORK (AP) — New York's mayor has made no secret of going after a digital grail: rivaling Silicon Valley as a high-tech hub.

The city isn't there, at least not yet, but it can point to a series of promising signs. Tech titans including Google and Facebook have ramped up their presences in New York in recent years. Some big-name newcomers are headquartered here. Plans for an elite technology graduate school, attracted with city money, are getting enough attention that a federal patent officer is being stationed on campus in a first-of-its-kind arrangement....

For all that, it will be difficult for New York — or anywhere — to match Silicon Valley's decades-deep grounding in technology innovation, said AnnaLee Saxenian, the dean of the School of Information at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of a book about Silicon Valley.

Still, she said, "there's nothing in the economy that says you can't have tech startups in both places doing well."

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Last updated: October 4, 2016