By Davidson Edwards
Crazy thought isn’t it? This question has consumed my mind for the last 5 years, and I still have way more questions than answers
Why would we want a ‘Silicon Valley’ anyway?
It’s now a year and a half I’ve spent working in London’s ‘Silicon Roundabout’ — everyone and their cousin wants a ‘Silicon Valley’ these days. But for good reason: it drives the economy and it creates loads of jobs. According to Tech Nation, London’s tech is ‘expanding 2.6 times faster than the rest of the UK economy’ and is ‘worth nearly £184 billion’ —that’s a lot of high-paid jobs. And if you’re reading this from the Caribbean, you’ll probably agree that we need those.
So again, I ask myself: “what would it take to form the next Silicon Valley smack in the center of Roseau? Or Portsmouth? Wesley? Or Grand Bay?”
How would we make one? What would it look like?
No one knows how you ‘make’ one of these things: it’s a system of different players & forces. You have investors with money and a risk appetite, entrepreneurs that think they can change the world, and passionate, highly productive staff. But like any system, its difficult to tell which one to start with. Then, when you pick one, there’s the chicken-and-egg problem of it needing the others to make sense.
