Uma pesquisa em www.google.com ou www.altavista.com com os nomes abaixo
para "silicon ..." (e VARIOS outros nao listados aqui como o "wireless
valley" sueco etc) revela varias informacoes sobre o fenomeno internacional
de high-tech clusters, sistemas de gestao em cada um e os tipos de
incentivos e de empresas atuantes.

Vale a pena tambem monitorar os fatores que causam atracao em diversos
paises como destino para negocios. As tabelas abaixo listam dois estudos.

Most competitive countries [source World Economic Forum, Davos, Switzerland]:

                        2000     1999     1998
United States      1        2        3
Singapore           2        1        1
Luxembourg       3        7       10
Netherlands        4        9        7
Ireland                5       10       11
Finland               6       11       15
Canada              8        3        2
Hong Kong         8        3        2
UK                      9        8        4
Switzerland       10        6        8
Taiwan              11        4        6
 

Countries best placed to benefit from the new economy [source Merryl Lynch]:

United States  1
UK                   2
Sweden           3
Switzerland     4
Finland            5
Ireland             6
Netherlands    7
Denmark        8

[ver tambem
 http://www.sedb.com.sg/industry21/in.html  Singapore INDUSTRY 21 STRATEGY
 http://www.brainheart.com The e-venture capital explosion
 http://www.bathwick.com/eleague European e-league]

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Silicon implants
It started when California's hi-tech heartland was nicknamed Silicon
Valley. Now there are hundreds of hotspots with the tell-tale prefix. But
what does it take to turn a suburb, city or even a whole continent into an
e-state?

Words Paul Clements Illustration Richard May
BA Magazine Sept00 pages 40-41
 

Silicon Alley
While the original Silicon Valley in California (see below) specialises in
hardware, New York's Silicon Alley is software centred. Stretching from the
Flatiron Building on 23rd street, don Broadway, through SoHo and into the
heart of the financial district, the Alley houses hundreds of wired
business, such as IBM and Bluewave (which designs sites for Glaxo Wellcome,
Reebok and Volkswagen). Although it generates more than $2bn (GBP1.25bn) a
year for the city, Forbes magazine described it as a "four-mile radius
where 25,000 people work at one money-losing company or another and get
paid half as much as their counterparts on the West Coast".

At its heart is 55 Broad Street, a monolithic, flashy shrine to the new
media monster. One of the 'smartest' buildings in the world, it boasts a
dozen start-up e-businesses, with a showpiece 5,000sq ft cyberlab on the
15th floor, where creatives at mobile phone giant Ericsson get down to some
serious netscaping.

For all the net's nerdy connotations, Silicon Alley is a painfully hip
place to work and party. Here, pointy heads don't swap business cards at
crowded new media bashes, they pass their contact details remotely, 'high
fiving' them to each other's palm PCs. Networking has never been such a
spectator sport.
 

Silicon Valley
At the end of every day in Silicon Valley, 60 new millionaires are made - a
figure made even more extraordinary by the fact the area has a live-in
population of just 1.6 million. Thirty years ago, the biggest microship
shop in the world was famous only for its sun-dried fruit. Now, the
high-tech influx has created dozens of billionaires.

Silicon Valley was 'invented' in 1972 by writer Don Hoeffler after he used
the phrase to describe an area of Santa Cruz, California, which had
undergone rapid regeneration during the electronics boom. The first
high-tech centres were funded by venture capitalists who were keen to turn
idealistic students from nearby Stanford University into go-getting
entrepreneurs.

Thanks to the Net revolution, Silicon Valley is now becoming an 'Internet
Valley'; it is home to eBay, Cisco and Yahoo!, as well as e-business giant
Oracle, whose software powers the net, and Sun Mycrosystems. The Valley now
has a gross domestic product in excess of GBP40bn, which is comparable to
that of Chile.
 

Silicon Desert
Ranked fourth in Forbes magazine's annual study of America's regional
economies, Albuquerque's Silicon Desert was founded in 1981, when Intel
opened its Fab 7 centre in the city, to which it has now added Fab 9 and
Fab 11. The list of companies operating from New Mexico's Rio Grande Valley
now includes Motorola, Sandia National Laboratories and AOL, famed for its
green glass-fronted HQ, Emerald City.
 

Silicon Fen
After ten years of slowburn, Cambridge's answer to Silicon Valley is ready
to ignite. Bill Gates is building a much-hyped GBP60m research centre in
the British university town, which saw a massive growth in technological
industries throughout the 1990s.

But business in Silicon Fen has long been on the up. Home to Britain's most
eminent cluster of high-technology companies such as Olivetti and Acorn
Computers, as well as some of Britain's fastest-growing firms, the area
provides work for 30,000 people in 700 companies, and has helped Cambridge
achieve a healthy annual GDP of GBP7bn.

And the expansion rolls ever on. As well as Gates' prestigious pratronage,
the British government announced in March that it was to review the
protected 'green belt' surrounding the city, amid fears that curbing growth
in Silicon Fen would be detrimental to the national economy.
 

Silicon Glen
Scotland's high-tech Glen, which has bubbled up around Fife, has sealed the
country's reputation for electronic excellence. It now produces 28 per cent
of Europe's personal computers, and more than seven percent of the world's
PCs, with the electronics industry  employing some 40,000 people.

In 1998, a GBP13m electronics training centre, hailed as Europe's first
'microchip' university, was set up in West Lothian to boost the region's
electronic technology sector - worth an estimated GBP15.5bn to the Scottish
economy.

With a struggling manufacturing industry, Silicon Glen has been a
much-needed Scottish success story. In March, American electronics firm
ADC, which specialises in transmission and networking systems, announced it
would be investing GBP27m ($43m) to site its European manufacturing base in
Glenrothes, Fife, a move which will create up to 1,100 local jobs.
 

CWM Silicon
By rights, the industrial town of Newport, Gwent, has the greatest claim to
a 'Silicon Valley' name. The nearest thing Wales has to Palo Alto, CWM
Silicon's core is provided by the Korean LG corporation, who have a large
semiconductor plant there.
 

Silicon Steppe
Novosibirsk, a snow-swept Siberian outpost, is leading the race to become
Russia's first Silicon Valley. Its technological credentials have been
boosted by its proximity to Akademgorodok, which was designated as western
Siberia's 'science city' by communist chiefs in 1957.

Novosibirsk is already home to Novolabs, the German software developer, but
is more famous for its centre of virology where some of the last remaining
samples of smallpox-infected skin tissues are stored, awaiting destruction
in 2002.

However, the region's inhospitable weather conditions may yet prevent
Silicon Steppe from luring the best brains from sun-kissed California.
Here, temperatures often reach -40C.
 

Silicon Subcontinent
Bangalore, in the southern state of Karnataka, is the high-tech jewel in
the [Indian] subcontinent crown, and has one of the world's fastest growing
economies. Until recently, it was where the country's finest technical
minds naturally migrated, encouraged by buzzing nightlife and relatively
high standards of living.

Although India's first cybercafe was set up in Bangalore, the city took a
blow to its cyber-pride when Bill Clinton asked to see the country's
technology at its best; he rejected a visit to Bangalore in favour of the
southern city of Hyderabad. Its smile was restored, however, when media
tycoon Rupert Murdoch pledged to set up a digital software facility in
Bangalore as a base for News Corps' software interests worldwide.
 

Silicon Island
In Asia, second best is nowhere. With Cyberjava, Malaysia's 'superhighway
corridor', outside Putrajaya, and a new media hub, Singapore One, due to
open in 2003, Hong Kong is keen to get back in the race to be the
continent's major information technology centre. Now, the Island is to
build the world's first Cyberport, a quayside living and working
'experience', with room for over 100 companies. IBM, Microsoft and Yahoo!
are rumoured to be interested in renting space, which will be pitched
competitively with Silicon Valley rates.
 

Other Silicon e-States

Slicon Alps - Carinthia, Austria
Silicon Bog - Country Clare, Ireland
Silicon Desert - Phoenix AZ, USA
Silicon Fin - Oulu, Finland
Silicon Forest - Portland, OR, USA
Silicon Glacier - Kalispel, Montana, USA
Silicon Gulch - San Jose, CA, USA
Silicon Hill - Hudson, Massachusetts, USA
Silicon Hollow - Oak Ridge, Tenessee, USA
Silicon Mountain - Colorado Springs, Colorado, USA
Silicon Necklace - suburbs of Boston, Massachusetts, USA
Silicon Plain - Kempele, Finland
Silicon Polder - the Netherlands ('polder' is land reclaimed from the sea)
Silicon Prairie - Iowa City, Iowa, USA
Silicon Sandbar - Cape Cod, Massachusetts, USA
Silicon Saxony - eastern state of Saxony, Germany
Silicon Spires - Oxford, England
Silicon Swamp - Florida, USA
Silicon Tundra - Ottawa, Canada
Silicon Valais - Valais, Switzerland
Silicon Valley of the East - Penang State, Malaysia
Silicon Wadi - Tel Aviv, Israel ('wadi' is Hebrew for valley)
Silicon Vineyard - Okanagan Valley, British Columbia, Canada
Telecom Valley - Minas Gerais, Brazil