Product Description

In Making Silicon Valley, Christophe Lécuyer shows that the explosive growth of the personal computer industry in Silicon Valley was the culmination of decades of growth and innovation in the San Francisco-area electronics industry. Using the tools of science and technology studies, he explores the formation of Silicon Valley as an industrial district, from its beginnings as the home of a few radio enterprises that operated in the shadow of RCA and other East Coast firms through its establishment as a center of the electronics industry and a leading producer of power grid tubes, microwave tubes, and semiconductors. He traces the emergence of the innovative practices that made this growth possible by following key groups of engineers and entrepreneurs. He examines the forces outside Silicon Valley that shaped the industry—in particular the effect of military patronage and procurement on the growth of the industry and on the development of technologies—and considers the influence of Stanford University and other local institutions of higher learning.

Lécuyer argues that Silicon Valley's emergence and its growth were made possible by the development of unique competencies in manufacturing, in product engineering, and in management. Entrepreneurs learned to integrate invention, design, manufacturing, and sales logistics, and they developed incentives to attract and retain a skilled and motivated workforce. The largest Silicon Valley firms—including Eitel-McCullough (Eimac), Litton Industries, Varian Associates, Fairchild Semiconductor, and Intel—dominated the American markets for advanced tubes and semiconductors and, because of their innovations in manufacturing, design, and management, served as models and incubators for other electronics ventures in the area.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1144718 in Books
• Published on: 2005-12-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 405 pages

Review
"Making Silicon Valley is meatier than its contemporaries. Dense and replete with footnotes, it's an expert book written for experts-readers who already know Robert Noyce from Gordon Moore. For them, it's a detailed and nuanced discussion of how and why Silicon Valley emerged as a center of manufacturing, product engineering, and management."
— HBS Working Knowledge

"Lécuyer's book is the most scrupulous scholarly exploration so far of the cluster of innovative firms that has come to be called Silicon Valley. It is a book that should be read by anyone curious about the emergence of the high-tech electronics firms that have created this remarkable concentration of innovative talent."
—Nathan Rosenberg, Professor of Economics (Emeritus), Stanford University

"Silicon Valley wannabes search for the Valley's secrets of success. Lécuyer's impressively informed response reminds them that God is in the manufacturing details."
—Thomas P. Hughes, author of Human-Built World: How to Think about Technology and Culture

About the Author
Christophe Lécuyer is a Historian at the Chemical Heritage Foundation.

Customer Reviews

An excellent historical contribution that is also a good read
Lecuyer provides a compelling new perspective on the development of Silicon Valley, grounded in the evolution of a unique electronics manufacturing capability in the region. The centrality of manufacturing is traced through the growth both of an ecosystem of high-technology firms across four decades and of the novel business and management practices that were created. With this manufacturing perspective, Lecuyer shows how sucessive waves of high technology industries, from tubes to semiconductors to software, grew on the business, social, and technological innovations and capacities of the preceeding waves on the Peninsula.

Lecuyer's narrative is engaging, and populated by remarkable characters like the Varian brothers, Gordon Moore, Jean Hoerni, Robert Noyce, Andy Grove, and Apple Computer's "two Steves." The scholarship is deep and thorough.

Making Silicon Valley strikes me as an important contriubtion to the literature that would be of interest to many readers who are curious about the history of technology and business, well beyond the academic specialists for whom it will do doubt become standard fare.

Insights into Silicon Valley's high-tech evolution
In the mid-1970s, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, founders of a Silicon Valley startup named Apple, asked Intel retiree Mike Markkula to invest in their firm. Sensing that it could become a winner, he gave them $92,000 and, in 1977, went to work for the company. Three years later, Apple went public and Markkula made millions. Time and again over the decades, this amazing story has repeated itself on the San Francisco Peninsula now known as Silicon Valley. getAbstract finds that historian Christophe Lécuyer does a capable, intriguing, intricately researched job of taking readers behind the scenes to learn how Silicon Valley first developed, what makes it tick and what its high-tech mastery has accomplished. While some of the technical terms may require a learning curve, this is the place to learn about the center of technology in the U.S. before it came to create and dominate the high-tech industry.