Stuart W. Leslie

Selling Silicon Valley: Frederick Terman's Model for Regional Advantage

This paper explores the origins of the Silicon Valley model for regional economic development, and attempts to deploy this model elsewhere in the United States and abroad. Frederick Terman, Stanfords provost, first envisioned its unique partnership of academia and industry, and trained the first generation of students who effected it. He patiently cultivated an aggressively entrepreneurial culture in what he called “the newly emerging community of technical scholars.” Beginning in the 1960s, business groups elsewhere set out to build their own versions of Silicon Valley, some enlisting the assistance of Terman and his proteges. After discussing the emergence of the Stanford-Silicon Valley effort, the paper examines in detail the New Jersey Institute of Science and Technology, an effort led by Bell Laboratories; the Graduate Research Center of the Southwest and the SMU Foundaton for Science and Engineering in Dallas, Texas; and the Korea Advanced Insitute of Science and Technology, Termans last and arguably most successful attempt. The paper discusses the reasons for the difficulties in creating new versions, and suggests explanations for the apparent success of the Korean experiment.

Exporting MIT: Science, technology, and nation-building in India and Iran

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) emerged from World War II with an impressive, worldwide reputation in basic and applied science and engineering. After redefining its own engineering education in the 1950s, MIT responded to the challenge of U.S. policy makers and foundation officials and its own sense of mission in engineering research, teaching, and practice by assisting in establishing new technical institutions of higher education around the world. This paper focuses on MIT’s participation in the creation of such institutions in India and in Iran. Three case studies explore the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur, the Birla Institute of Technology and Science, and the Aryamehr University of Technology. The aim of establishing an international system of expertise with MIT at its apex reveals both the strengths and the limitations of the “export” effort.

Electronics and the geography of innovation in post‐war America

This study looks at three important centres of post‐war American electronics research and manufacturing ‐ the Princeton corridor in New Jersey, Dallas, Texas, and Silicon Valley ‐ as a way of understanding shifting patterns of regional competitiveness. We consider each of these technoregions not as models but rather as ecologies of mutually dependent institutions, corporate, academic, and governmental. We were especially intrigued by the attempts of the New Jersey and Dallas regions to learn from and emulate what each perceived to be the lessons of Silicon Valley. In both cases, corporate consortia hired Frederick Terman, the Stanford University electrical engineer and provost acknowledged as “the father of Silicon Valley”, to teach them the secrets of high technology development We examine these efforts and their subsequent failure, which we attribute to some fundamental misinterpretations of the Silicon Valley experience. We conclude with some reflections on a new pattern of regional development, a clus...

Entrepreneurial science : new links between corporations, universities, and government

Technology 2000: An Overview The Biotechnology Company: An Entrepreneurial Pattern Large Companies Look to the University The Universities: Allies with Industry Federal and State Assistance for High-Technology Procompetitive Research: A New Way to Do Business The Technology Transfer Specialists The Financing of New Ventures The Research and Development Limited Partnership: Potentials and Problems Government Strategies in R&D: A Comparison Some Implications A View of the Future Bibliography Index

Steeple building at Stanford: Electrical engineering, physics, and microwave research

Stanford Universitys microwave research program offers an interesting perspective on the interaction of electrical engineering and physics. Beginning with the invention of the klystron by William Hansen and the Varian brothers in the 1930s, Stanfords departments of physics and electrical engineering worked together closely in exploring the science and technology of microwaves. On the engineering side, this knowledge led to a series of important electronics devices for communication and defense. On the scientific side, it became the heart of the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, one of the most expensive and productive scientific facilities of its time. What made Stanfords program so productive were physicists and electrical engineers--William Hansen, Edward Ginzton, Frederick Terman--who combined an appreciation of the scientific and technical potential of microwave research with an entrepreneurial talent for assembling the intellectual and financial resources crucial for success. They brought together electrical engineering and physics not so much by collapsing disciplinary boundaries as by opening up opportunities in the spaces between them.

Thomas Midgley and the Politics of Industrial Research

The conventional distinctions between “practical” and “scientific” research and development can be misleading. The experience of Thomas Midgley, Jr., at the General Motors Corporation in the three decades before World War II, and especially his critical role in the development of “antiknock” gasoline additives, freon refrigerant, and synthetic rubber, illustrate this fact. Dr. Leslie demonstrates that the management of corporate research and development, especially as that management affects uniquely talented individuals whose interests do not necessarily reflect the immediate needs of the company as seen by management, is basic to success. To solve such problems as they arose, Charles F. Kettering, himself a sympathetic scientist as well as distinguished inventor, worked closely with chief executive Alfred P. Sloan, whose genius for solving managerial problems matched the scientific genius of the most brilliant men in the General Motors laboratories.

Reestablishing a Conversation in STS: Who’s Talking? Who’s Listening? Who Cares?

Finding an appropriate place for STS within the American science and engineering curriculum has never been easy. Convincing science, engineering, and medical students, and their professors, to pay serious attention to the broader context of their respective professions seems to require a sustained dialogue across conventional disciplinary boundaries. Otherwise, STS ends up talking mostly to itself and its critics rather than to its most important audience, students (at all levels) and the general public (especially museum visitors). This essay considers a number of historical and present-day examples to argue that the founding vision of STS as a collaborative enterprise still offers some valuable lessons about how best to reach that audience.

The Cold War and American Science: The Military-Industrial-Academic Complex at MIT and Stanford

A university polarized around the military steeple building in electronics military guidance and control sonic boom the power of the nucleus accelerating physics a matter of state material science the days of reckoning - March 4 and April 3.

Atomic structures: the architecture of nuclear nationalism in India and Pakistan

Abstract A half-century after their completion, India’s Bhabha Atomic Research Centre (BARC) and the Pakistan Institute of Nuclear Science and Technology (PINSTECH) stand out as unchallenged architectural advertisements for ‘nuclear nationalism’. Elsewhere, Atoms for Peace reactors made no pretence to architectural refinement. In the right hands, however, ‘Cold War Modern’ could express the hard power of the nuclear age. For India and Pakistan, these nuclear laboratory complexes became the public faces of the peaceful atom that held out the promise, and masked the peril, of the atomic age at home and abroad, and deliberately deflected attention away from clandestine nuclear weapons programmes. BARC and PINSTECH, envisioned as cornerstones for self-confident and self-reliant programmes of nuclear physics, embodied the paradox of postcolonial science, necessarily borrowing from the West but determined to break the cycle of dependency, in defiance of Western expectations.

“Suburban Warriors”: The Blue-Collar and Blue-Sky Communities of Southern California’s Aerospace Industry

Los Angeles’s aerospace suburbs no longer have many aerospace companies or workers in them, but their legacy—a geographical division of labor, class, and race reflected in and reinforced by corporate planning—continues to shape the region’s suburban landscape. In the early 1960s, aerospace companies relocated their new divisions to the emerging edge cities of greater Los Angeles. Until the end of the Cold War, these “blue-sky” suburbs—white, white-collar, and with predominantly male workforces—reinterpreted the California dream for an upper-middle class who believed they had little in common with their blue-collar counterparts left behind in older working-class communities.