If you go to see Silicon Valley, what you'll see are buildings. But it's the
people that make it Silicon Valley, not the buildings. I read occasionally
about attempts to set up "technology parks" in other places, as if the active
ingredient of Silicon Valley were the office space. An article about Sophia
Antipolis bragged that companies there included Cisco, Compaq, IBM, NCR, and
Nortel. Don't the French realize these aren't startups?

Building office buildings for technology companies won't get you a silicon
valley, because the key stage in the life of a startup happens before they want
that kind of space. The key stage is when they're three guys operating out of
an apartment. Wherever the startup is when it gets funded, it will stay. The
defining quality of Silicon Valley is not that Intel or Apple or Google have
offices there, but that they were started there.

So if you want to reproduce Silicon Valley, what you need to reproduce is those
two or three founders sitting around a kitchen table deciding to start a
company. And to reproduce that you need those people.

Paul Graham - "How to Be Silicon Valley"
http://www.paulgraham.com/siliconvalley.html