Entrepreneurship and the rise of Silicon Valley: The career of Robert Noyce, 1956--1990 (California)

The premise of this dissertation is that the career of Robert Noyce can illuminate the relationship between entrepreneurship and the rise of the semiconductor industry in Silicon Valley, California. Noyce co-invented the integrated circuit, the direct precursor to the microprocessors that lie at the heart of modern electronics. He co-founded Silicon Valley's first successful semiconductor company (Fairchild Semiconductor in 1957), as well as the industry's most powerful firm: Intel. Noyce both co-founded and served as a prominent spokesman for the industry's most effective lobbying organization, the Semiconductor Industry Association. His successful entrepreneurial career inspired other Silicon Valley residents to start their own high-tech companies. For the last two years of his life, Noyce served as the first CEO of SEMATECH, a billion-dollar manufacturing research consortium with membership that included fourteen semiconductor firms and the Department of Defense.; The dissertation draws on twenty-five oral history interviews with Noyce's contemporaries and on four years of research in a half-dozen corporate and university archives. The dissertation explores four major themes: the roles of apprenticeship and invention in high-tech entrepreneurship, the relationship between the U.S. government and American semiconductor entrepreneurs, the gap between the myth and reality of entrepreneurial success, and the limits of entrepreneurship.; One chapter is devoted to each of the following topics: technical apprenticeship, invention, management, strategy, government, culture, and statesmanship. Noyce's work, the focal point of each chapter, is placed in the larger contexts of history and technological and industrial development. Chapters called “Interconnections” provide the narrative framework, moving Noyce and his contemporaries from one setting to the next.; The dissertation focuses on Noyce while recognizing the obvious truths that he alone did not make the semiconductor industry and that the industry in turn is not solely responsible for the creation of Silicon Valley. Instead, the dissertation demonstrates that both the semiconductor industry and Silicon Valley are products of a complex and mutually reinforcing interplay of technology, business, money, politics, and culture—and that Robert Noyce's career both catalyzed and reflected critical developments in each of these areas.