Take the outsourcing trend to the extreme and the West ends up with nations full of CEOs and investors. Because labour in Asia and Eastern Europe will be so much cheaper, the West will just be too expensive to do anything but heading up companies.

The same faith awaits Silicon Valley, argues John Hennessy, president and professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Stanford University in an interview in Business Week.

The future role for Silicon Valley will be to create elite groups of technologists who control the overall strategy and provide the core intellectual property. "...at some point you need the whiteboard in the room. Now the question is: At some point can you partition that task? (...) You see a lot of examples where the core technology group is still in the Valley, but, (…) you can imagine taking some portion of that task and performing it elsewhere."

The success of Silicon Valley as the beating heart of high tech is generally attributed to the fact that it combines critical mass in key areas like venture capital funding, a highly skilled workforce and a large concentration of technology companies. But if Hennessy is right and Silicon Valley wants to survive, it has to become even better at what it does.

29 Nov 2004