Mannerisms

The Greek government is backing an initiative called the Hellenic Technology Cluster Initiative. Based in a building near Athens airport (which confusingly has three names: Spata, Markopoulo and El Venizelos) the cluster already has some 20 companies involved and is looking for more.

For many people a cluster strategy represents The Curse of Silicon Valley striking again. What John Doerr called the "greatest legal agglomeration of wealth in the history of the planet', has given rise to many imitations. Usually pale ones.

Even Nikita Kruschev, Premier of Russia in the early 1960s, got infected by The Curse. After being bowled over by a visit to Silicon Valley he returned to Russia and ordered the founding of a Russian equivalent which became the city of Zelenograd about 40 miles outside Moscow..

Now home to the Russian chip companies Mikron and Angstrem and the ill-fated Russian initiative to build a cyclotron for chip-making (never needed), Zelenograd is inhabited by 10,000 high-tech PhDs, but has never delivered any significant agglomeration of wealth, or technology, or products, or anything much.

The most advanced commercial IC process being deployed in Zelenograd today is 0.18 micron.

Numerous other government-led initiatives to stimulate clusters in other countries have had mixed results, though clusters have naturally grown where the universities are good, and where people like to live like Dallas, Austin, Boston, Cambridge, Bristol, Edinburgh, Munich, Sophia Antipolis, Osaka, Frankfurt, Friesing, Hsinchu, Lund, Kista, Caen, Grenoble, Aalberg etc.

It's always arguable how much government has helped these clusters grow, or how much it's a natural flowering from a benign climate consisting of academic excellence, availability of venture capital and reasonable real estate prices.

So has the proposed Hellenic Technology Cluster Initiative got a chance?

At IEF2007, Professor Vasillios Makios pointed to the Parthenon as evidence of Greek capability in design simplicity.

If the greeks can bring the same flair to 250m gate SOC design , then watch out for the Greek chip industry.