Silicon Valley

　Silicon Valley is the common name for the high-tech industry area spreading on the south to the west side of San Francisco Bay. At first, the name Silicon Valley was used in a column by a journalist in 1971 who named the area after silicon, which is the basic material of semiconductors of the semiconductor industry, that was concentrated in the area at the time. It is said that the history started from Hewlett-Packard Co. established in 1939 by the support of Fred Terman, Professor of Stanford University. At first, it was a rural zone where only Stanford University and several high-tech companies were located, and apple orchards were spreading that became the origin of the company name of Apple Computer. In 1951, Stanford Research Park was established to compete with the universities on the east coast, and industry concentration has been promoted since then. Though it is a high-tech industry area, the main technological field and major companies of Silicon Valley grown after World War Ⅱ have not been consistent. It has the characteristics of changing its main industry in almost every decade, namely military products from the 50s to 60s, semi-conductors from the 60s to 70s, personal computers from the latter half of the 70s to the 80s, and the Internet from the latter half of the 80s to the 90s. Venture companies, such as Netscape Communications Corporation established in 1994, have been growing rapidly, and the area is leading the high-tech-related industries in the world to today.

Austin

 In the Texas state capital of Austin, Dr. George Kozmetsky, who was invited to the city in 1966 as a Dean of School of Business, University of Texas, advocated the importance of education on entrepreneurship from an early stage, attracted enterprises and established support organizations in cooperation with the state government, administration, and financial circles, and established the IC2 Institute （1977） to research the commercialization of technologies and to educate specialists. As a result, high-tech companies, such as MCC （Micro-Computer Corporation Consortium） which is a joint research institute of the computer industry, Sematech, IBM, and Motorola, have gradually concentrated in the region and formed a cluster. After that, due to the slump of the American economy in the latter half of the 1980s, spin-offs, who were laid-off engineers of companies like IBM and Sematech increased in the 1990s, but ATI （Austin Technology Incubator established in 1989）, established on the initiative of Dr. Kozmetsky, played an important role in keeping excellent engineers in the region. This cluster has grown rapidly from its core role of attracting enterprises to a cluster, and is an example of an acceleration of cluster development by political assistance in contrast with a naturally formed cluster.

San Diego

 San Diego in California has a biotechnology cluster where many biotechnology-related companies are concentrated. In San Diego, in addition to research functions including Scripps Institution of Oceanography （1903） and Salk Institute for Biological Studies （1960）, there was UCSD （University of California, San Diego）, and spin-offs have established many venture companies. One of the major examples is Hybritech Incorporated. This company was established in 1978 by the researchers of UCSD, and the spin-offs from this company have established more than 50 companies. What supported these entrepreneurs was UCSD Connect, established in 1985, which was based on the UCSD. As one of its programs, there is a course called Spring-Board which covers a range from the early stage of business launching to the fund-raising stage and to support formulating business plans from just a business idea through to detailed training. In this Spring-Board program, more than 300 people get together from seven o'clock in the morning and make enthusiastic information exchanges during breakfast meetings. It seems that the existence of such meetings is making the entrepreneur network of San Diego profound, and is promoting spin-offs.