Silicon Fen
Silicon Fen is the name given to the region around Cambridge, England, which is home to a large number of high-tech businesses. Many of these have connections with Cambridge University, and the area is now one of the most important technology centres in Europe. It is claimed that Silicon Fen is the second largest venture capital market in the world, after Silicon Valley.
It is called "Silicon Fen" by analogy with Silicon Valley in California, and because of the large area of drained fenland to the north of Cambridge. The name is also a deliberate rhyme with "Silicon Glen", a pre-existing high-tech enclave in Scotland.
The so-called Cambridge phenomenon, giving rise to start-up companies in a town previously only having a little light industry in the electrical sector, is usually dated to the founding of the Cambridge Science Park in 1970: this was an initiative of Trinity College, Cambridge and moved away from a traditional low-development policy for Cambridge.
The characteristic of Cambridge is small companies (as few as three people, in some cases), in sectors such as computer-aided design. Over time the number of companies has grown; it has not proved easy to count them, but recent estimates have placed the number anywhere between 1,000 and 3,500 companies. They are spread over an area defined perhaps by the CB postcode (which is highly sought after), or more generously in an area bounded by Ely-Newmarket-Saffron Walden-Royston-St. Neots-Huntingdon.
Only a tiny proportion of these companies have grown into multinationals: ARM is the most obvious example, and more recently Cambridge Silicon Radio has seen rapid growth due to the uptake of Bluetooth. The region does have one of the most flexible job markets in the technology sector, meaning that the same people are often retained in other companies in the Cambridge area after a start-up fails. One explanation for the area's success is that after a while such an employment market is self-sustaining, since employees are willing to move to an area that promises a future beyond any one company.
The spread of technologies now includes biotechnology in a broad sense and bioinformatics, as well as mobile phones, on top of more traditional software development.
References
- The Cambridge Cluster Report 2003, Library House 2003, Download
- The Cambridge Cluster Report 2004, Library House in assocation with Grant Thornton 2004, Download
See also
- Acorn Computers Ltd
- Andy Hopper
- Hermann Hauser
- List of places with 'Silicon' names
- Sinclair Research Ltd