It started when Frederick Terman lent his students, William Hewitt and David Packard, Five Hundred Dollars to start their company. Within several years, Hewlett-Packard was able to earn several million dollars making its founders and Terman very rich. HP, as Hewlett-Packard is now known, is a multi-billion dollar company with branches all around the world. The formula of “Technology + Business Savvy + Financing = BIG $$$!” quickly became accepted. This lure for quick profits fueled the growth of more technical know-how, management savvy and venture capitalist. Thus came Fairchild, Intel, Apple Computers, Cisco and Oracle. These companies became legends followed and emulated by a generation of Americans. These are the Yahoo!, Google and Amazon of today.
If we are to re-create a ‘Silicon Valley’ in the Philippines, beyond awards and incentives for entrepreneurs, we should strive to make engineers, scientists, investors and entrepreneurs believe that they could also generate BIG $$$ in the Philippines. We have to make them believe that the ‘Silicon Valley’ dream is possible in the Philippines.
This is not impossible. The Philippines in general is not known to be a technologically advanced country. However, there are oasis of scientific and technical excellence. The Diliman-Katipunan area containing the University of the Philippines , the Ateneo de Manila University and several research institutes of the Department of Science and Technology. Within this area covering almost 1000 hectares are the National Institutes of Physics (NIP) , National Institute of Chemistry, UP College of Science , UP College of Engineering , Advanced Science and Technology Institute (ASTI) and Philippine Nuclear Research Institute (PNRI). Check out their websites for interesting researches. [note: I'm from UP and DOST and the I know of their research institutes. I'm not familiar with the colleges and research institutes of Ateneo but i do know that they have very good physics, mathematics and entrepreneurship departments. If you have additional info, please write it as a comment.]
With this technological capability, a Philippine Silicon Valley is possible and there are groups pushing for it as early as late 1990's. The Katipunan Forum (katipunanforum@yahoogroups.com) is one such group. It is a virtual group of Filipino scientists, engineers and investors both here and abroad that aims to establish a “Silicon Valley”-like environment along Katipunan Avenue to tap the technology and business potential of the University of the Philippines and the Ateneo de Manila University. They aim to promote technology-based entrepreneurship by linking the capabilities found in the universities and bridging the limitations of Filipino entrepreneur through a network of technology and business experts here and abroad. The UP Technology Management Center and the Technology Business Incubator is also there. The Pilosopong Tasyo Technopreneurs Multipurpose Cooperative is also one such group. Unfortunately, good researches still can't find their way to industrial applications, some venture capitalist goes out of business for lack of technopreneur clients and local industry still rely heavily on imported equipment and technologies.
" If you built castles in the sky ; your work need not be lost ; that is where they should be. Now, put the foundations under them. "
-- Henry David Thoreau
The Alternative Catch-up Strategy in this website proposes one possible approach how to build the foundations of the Philippine Silicon Valley.
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