Myisha Nawar
Silicon Valley is widely labeled as the ultimate incubator for start-ups and new entrepreneurs. The biggest mistake innovators make trying to duplicate Silicon Valley is primarily focusing on their ingredients. Think about it. A recipe is the game changer. Ingredients can be replaced, added or skipped. What are the aforementioned ingredients for Silicon Valley? Assets, venture capital and skilled workers. All of which you can personalize. The recipe is what matters most. Recipes- social interactions that convert those ingredients into vibrant companies. Learning the right lessons of the valley can empower entrepreneurs and take them to new heights of innovation and productivity.
Arguably, the most important factor in its success has been the formation of a unique culture: one that enables people with diverse skills, who often don’t know each other, to mix and match-collaborating and trusting in ways that people in other cultures don’t. As people join forces on temporary projects and recombine on other projects a creative reassembly of the work force is brought forth.
Let’s not kid ourselves. Money matters and is still the most effective motivator. If you can’t swing the cash, try lifting up your compensation packages with equity and finesse. Lure the employees in and keep them in. The frontier spirit of the Silicon Valley culture values pragmatic cooperation. It places individualism tempered by the need to infiltrate a larger community on a pedestal! It may be helpful to think of Silicon Valley as a rain-forest. It thrives due to the combination of many elements to create new fauna. The rain-forest is just an analogy. Silicon Valley is almost like a biological system! Flowing through this biological system are nutrients: talents, ideas and capital. As the system becomes more productive, nutrients start to flow faster. That is where the culture comes into limelight. In the real world, economic systems are made of human beings, not anonymous gears. And in the real world, human nature gets in the way. Believe it or not, human nature creates enormous transaction costs in society. To maximize business innovation, we must transform culture. And people learn culture not from top-down instruction, but through actual practice: role modeling, peer-to-peer interaction with diverse partners, feedback mechanisms that penalize bad behavior and making social contracts explicit.