A few months back I saw a really interesting video about the Military and its impact on the creation and development of Silicon Valley. It was a really interesting look at the history and how the government and military played a role in the rich innovation that took place there and still does to this day.
The just the other day I came across this post kind of talking about the same thing.
At the end of an interesting post about the changes in the American economy during the latter half of the 20th century, Dane Stangler has an interesting aside about the role of the military in the early development of Silicon Valley. He notes that the Silicon Valley started out as a hub for defense contractors and only later became a center for the private semiconductor industry and (still later) for the software and Internet industries.
He also notes that the author of the other piece states that if a town is looking to build a center for innovation, they should look to the Military or the defense industry. I was happy to see that Timothy Lee did not agree stating that
the military just isn’t as important to the semiconductor and communications industries as it was a few decades ago. The military still spends a ton of money on high-tech toys, but private firms also spend billions of dollars on R&D, and their spending is more squarely focused on consumer and business markets. Smart technologists don’t have to chase military contracts, they can raise capital and go straight for the consumer market.
I enjoyed this as I often like to ponder what it takes to make cities hit that threshold like Silicon Valley has where they are considered “technology hubs”. There are many theories on this, like local Universities that feed the ecosystem and so on, but I also do not feel that the military is at the forefront of innovation anymore. I think the last thing the military has supplied the industry really was GPS, but since then I think the industry has been more of the provider of the innovation back into the military. Of course I could be totally wrong, usually am … but as I stated in a post I previously wrote, at least in the DC area, I would say that the government has actually be the stifler of innovation, not the driver.
Sure there are tons of defense contractors in our area here, and being one of them, what I see is our adoption of technology from the outside, not the other way around. The big buzzwords are grid computing, cloud computing initiatives, and so on. But these technologies are being brought in, not exported back out.
