Silicon Glen

Making It Happen: Fred Goodwin, RBS and the Men Who Blew Up the British Economy
by Iain Martin
Published 11 Sep 2013

He was an engineer who became convinced that from the ruins of post-industrial Scotland in the late 1970s and 1980s could emerge a bank under his leadership that would lead a national reinvention. From the late 1980s he gathered together bright young managers, friends from the government economic development agency he had run and executives from Scotland’s computer industry, ‘Silicon Glen’. With them he set about remaking the Royal Bank of Scotland. Mathewson’s new notion echoed an old idea. The reputation of the Scots as uniquely canny bankers stretched back three centuries, to when a Scot, William Paterson, had helped found the Bank of England in 1694 to lend the money the English government needed to wage continental war.

…

In 1981 Mathewson was recruited to head the Scottish Development Agency, the taxpayer-funded quango originally established in 1975 by a Labour government. It was supposed to solve the riddle of what Scotland would do once it didn’t make so many ships or extract so much coal from the ground. The answer appeared to be that it would extract oil instead, make computers (in the emerging industry known as ‘Silicon Glen’) and possibly expand financial services. Mathewson’s mantra as boss of the SDA was that he would make any public sector money available go as far as possible, whether it was in trying to kickstart the attempts at regenerating Glasgow or persuading foreign businesses to invest in Scotland. He also wanted to use his muscle and expanding network of connections to save grand old companies if they were worth saving.

…

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The Great Economists Ten Economists whose thinking changed the way we live-FT Publishing International (2014)
by Phil Thornton
Published 7 May 2014

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The Best Interface Is No Interface: The Simple Path to Brilliant Technology (Voices That Matter)
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Published 10 Feb 2015

Silicon Allee, 23. Silicon Alley, 24. Silicon Anchor, 25. Silicon Beach, 26. Silicon Border, 27. Silicon Bridge, 28. Silicon Canal, 29. Silicon Canal, 30. Silicon Cape, 31. Silicon Coast, 32. Silicon Corridor, 33. Silicon Desert, 34. Silicon Dock, 35. Silicon Docks, 36. Silicon Fen, 37. Silicon Forest, 38. Silicon Glen, 39. Silicon Goli, 40. Silicon Gorge, 41. Silicon Gulf, 42. Silicon Harbor, 43. Silicon Hill, 44. Silicon Hills, 45. Silicon Lagoon, 46. Silicon Lane, 47. Silicon Mall, 48. Silicon Mallee, 49. Silicon Mill, 50. Silicon Peninsula, 51. Silicon Pier, 52. Silicon Roundabout, 53. Silicon Sandbar, 54.

Social Life of Information
by John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid
Published 2 Feb 2000

Death of Distance Despite our various mixed metaphors, when we talk about the region and related notions of place and locality, we mean these terms quite literally. Even for information technology firms, neighborhoods and regions remain significant. The namesnot only Silicon Valley, but less-familiar names from the Silicon family ("Silicon Glen" (Scotland), "Silicon Alley" (New York), "Silicon Forest" (Oregon), and many more) as well as others such as "Multimedia Gulch" and "Audio Alley''suggest the continuing formation (and imitation) of clusters. Like firms, ecologies need a range of overlapping but also complementary practices and organizations.

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From Airline Reservations to Sonic the Hedgehog: A History of the Software Industry
by Martin Campbell-Kelly
Published 15 Jan 2003

In the last 20 or 30 years, in Europe and many other parts of the world, planners have attempted to reproduce the success of Silicon Valley in their local economies. Great Britain, for example, has a Silicon Fen (in the lowlands around Cambridge), a Silicon Ditch (in the Thames Valley corridor to the west of London), and a Silicon Glen (in Scotland). When planners attempt to clone Silicon Valley, they generally do so by trying to establish an economic and physical environment similar to that which enabled the original Silicon Valley to flourish. Such attempts are always deeply informed by history. For example, it is widely understood that Silicon Valley did not happen overnight.

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