The Future is Engineering | The Curious Cat Science and Engineering blog explores: innovation, technology, research, education, economics, gadgets, health care and scientific inquiry.

Do Great Engineering Schools Beget Entrepreneurism? by Brent Edwards provides two great links.

How to Kick Silicon Valley’s Butt by Guy Kawasaki:

Focus on educating engineers. The most important thing you can do is establish a world-class school of engineering. Engineering schools beget engineers. Engineers beget ideas. And ideas beget companies. End of discussion.

If I had to point to the single biggest reason for Silicon Valley’s existence, it would be Stanford University—specifically, the School of Engineering. Business schools are not of primary importance because MBAs seldom sit around discussing how to change the world with great products.

Why Startups Condense in America:

You need a great university to seed a silicon valley, and so far there are few outside the US. I asked a handful of American computer science professors which universities in Europe were most admired, and they all basically said “Cambridge” followed by a long pause while they tried to think of others. There don’t seem to be many universities elsewhere that compare with the best in America, at least in technology.

Both essays make many excellent points – read them! They both realize there is no magic bullet. Many factors will determine how successfully an economy can create powerful economic gains. Both focus on the importance of world class engineering education to create something to rival silicon valley. Many countries are investing heavily in science and engineering education in order to secure the long term economic benefits that such investment will lead to.

Few can hope to create a silicon valley. But even if the goal is just to gain economic advantage from their heavy investments in engineering education they would be wise to take heed of the ideas presented by both authors.

More than just graduating more and more engineers is required to gain powerful economic advantages. That is a good first step but today China, India, Korea, Germany, Japan, United Kingdom… should be looking at other things the USA has done right (in addition to investing in engineering education).

The factors in addition to great schools are just as important now as trying to create engineering programs that can compare to Standford, MIT, Purdue, Carnegie Mellon, Berkley, Illinois… That still should be a focus but the progress in that area has been significant now is the time to look to additional areas while continuing to work on improving the schools themselves. And the USA should try to add to the advantages that they have and try to extend the success of places like MIT and Standford to more schools (as many people are trying to do).

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