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Technology park or millionaires valley

16 November 2009 11:35 (UTC +04:00)

Baku - APA-ECONOMICS. By googling on, you can find many definitions of "technology park" such as technopark, industrial park, technology park, science park, research park, technopole, hi-tech park etc to mean an area in which there is an enabling environment for the development and commercialization of innovative integrated scientific organizations, universities and industrial enterprises.

At the dawn of the 21st century technology parks were an association of companies with a narrow specialization in a single business structure to produce common products. Tenant companies were provided not only with the place and all the necessary services but also with competitors, partners and guaranteed employment.
Technology parks normally have a think-tank which coordinates the work of all departments and provide the necessary infrastructure for doing business: modern facilities, work facilities, leisure and business presentations, computer software, as well as lawyers, accountants, auditors and other experts.

The model of modern parks comes from Silicon Valley, the southern part of the San Francisco Bay Area in Northern California, United States.
The term Silicon Valley was coined by Ralph Vaerst, a Central California entrepreneur. Its first published use is credited to Don Hoefler, a friend of Vaerst’s, who used the phrase as the title of a series of articles in the weekly trade newspaper Electronic News. The series, entitled "Silicon Valley USA," began in the paper’s issue dated January 11, 1971. Valley refers to the Santa Clara Valley, located at the southern end of San Francisco Bay, while Silicon refers to the high concentration of companies involved in the semiconductor (silicon is used to create most semiconductors commercially) and computer industries that were concentrated in the area. These firms slowly replaced the orchards which gave the area its initial nickname, the Valley of Heart’s Delight.

Since the early twentieth century, Silicon Valley has been home to a vibrant, growing electronics industry. The industry began through experimentation and innovation in the fields of radio, television, and military electronics. Stanford University, its affiliates, and graduates have played a major role in the evolution of this area.

Over the past forty odd years, Silicon Valley became the focus of global electronic and computer industry. In the 70 th and 80 th years of XX century, there are well established numerous corporations and factories of semiconductor industry. By early 90-ies the priority activities of corporations LEDs began to shift toward research and development of advanced computer technology, and marketing of digital technology and software.

By the early 1970s there were many semiconductor companies in the area, computer firms using their devices, and programming and service companies serving both. Industrial space was plentiful and housing was still inexpensive. The growth was fueled by the emergence of the venture capital industry on Sand Hill Road, beginning with Kleiner Perkins in 1972; the availability of venture capital exploded after the successful $1.3 billion IPO of Apple Computer in December 1980.
Although semiconductors are still a major component of the area’s economy, Silicon Valley has been most famous in recent years for innovations in software and Internet services. Silicon Valley has significantly influenced computer operating systems, software, and user interfaces.

Using money from NASA and the U.S. Air Force, Doug Engelbart invented the mouse and hypertext-based collaboration tools in the mid-1960s, while at Stanford Research Institute (now SRI International). When Engelbart’s Augmentation Research Center declined in influence due to personal conflicts and the loss of government funding, Xerox hired some of Engelbart’s best researchers. In turn, in the 1970s and 1980s, Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) played a pivotal role in object-oriented programming, graphical user interfaces (GUIs), Ethernet, PostScript, and laser printers.

While Xerox marketed equipment using its technologies, for the most part its technologies flourished elsewhere. The diaspora of Xerox inventions led directly to 3Com and Adobe Systems, and indirectly to Cisco, Apple Computer and Microsoft. Apple’s Macintosh GUI was largely a result of Steve Jobs’ visit to PARC and the subsequent hiring of key personnel. Microsoft’s Windows GUI is based on Apple’s work, more or less directly. Cisco’s impetus stemmed from the need to route a variety of protocols over Stanford’s campus Ethernet.
Silicon Valley is generally considered to have been the center of the dot-com bubble which started from the mid-1990s and collapsed after the NASDAQ stock market began to decline dramatically in April 2000. During the bubble era, real estate prices reached unprecedented levels. For a brief time, Sand Hill Road was home to the most expensive commercial real estate in the world, and the booming economy resulted in severe traffic congestion.

Even after the dot-com crash, Silicon Valley continues to maintain its status as one of the top research and development centers in the world. A 2006 Wall Street Journal story found that 13 of the 20 most inventive towns in America were in California, and 10 of those were in Silicon Valley. San Jose led the list with 3,867 utility patents filed in 2005, and number two was Sunnyvale, at 1,881 utility patents.
According to a 2008- study by AeA in 2006 Silicon Valley was the third largest (cybercity) high-tech center in the United States, behind the New York metropolitan area and Washington metropolitan area, with 225,300 high-tech jobs. The Bay Area as a whole however, of which Silicon Valley is a part, would rank first with 386,000 high-tech jobs. Silicon Valley has the highest concentration of high-tech workers of any metropolitan area, with 285.9 out of every 1,000 private-sector workers.

The Silicon Valley has the highest average high-tech salary at $144,800. The region is the biggest high-tech manufacturing center in the United States. The unemployment rate of the region was 9.4% in January 2009, up from 7.8% in the previous month.
Thousands of high technology companies are headquartered in Silicon Valley; among those are Adobe Systems, Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), Agilent Technologies, Apple Inc., Applied Materials, Business Objects, Cisco Systems, eBay, Google, Hewlett-Packard, Intel, Intuit, Juniper Networks, LSI Logic, National Semiconductor, NetApp, Nvidia, Oracle Corporation, SanDisk, Sun Microsystems, Symantec, Yahoo! etc.
In recent years, the High Tech Revolution is the driving force of not only U.S. but also but also the global economy. Silicon Valley has and continues to exert an enormous influence on the development of high technology around the world.

The Azerbaijan Technology Park Establishment Project is in the agenda of the first National Internet Forum to be held on December 3-4, 2009.
The forum will be held by the national search engine YUMROO with support from by the Ministry of Communications and Information Technologies and the Ministry of Youth and Sport of Azerbaijan.

The idea of establishing a technology park in fast-growing Azerbaijan is very important and urgent now. Nobody is afraid to take risks by devising new projects and investing the money in them. Nobody is afraid to look silly with their "crazy" ideas. Everything is seen optimistic here, and everybody strongly believes in the imaginations about high technology and bright digital future of humanity

Of course, if you concentrate a large number of highly qualified specialists - scientists, engineers, business people (critical mass of brains and money) in a relatively small area, you can only see stunning results.