Higher education, innovation, and new ventures

Silicon Valley's unique R&D ecosystem is another cornerstone of its innovation and startup success. As part of the greater Bay Area it is the leading region for the development of new ideas, new technologies, and new business models. The global marketplace for innovation and invention. The key institution in our ‘Silicon Valley Innovation & Startup Model’ is higher education. The Bay Area is home to the worldwide foremost public and private research universities, renowned federal and state research institutes, independent research facilities, and corporate R&D labs. The University of California (UC) has four campuses in the area: Berkeley, San Francisco, Davis, and Santa Cruz. Stanford University, a private institution, is located in the heart of Silicon Valley: Palo Alto. Berkeley and Stanford rank among the world's best universities. California State University (CSU) has two campuses in the Bay Area: San Francisco State University and San Jose State University. And there is Santa Clara University, a small private Jesuit institution. Combined these universities enroll about 175,000 students in the Bay Area, a quarter of which are graduate students. Furthermore, there is a widely branched system of California Community Colleges which serve as important feeders of the Bay Area's universities. The Foothill-De Anza Community College District, located in the center of Silicon Valley, enrolls about 65,000 students. Such large numbers of university and college students make for a huge pool of talent that hightech companies and startups are keen to recruit from. Talent is the most important resource of corporations and new ventures that live off innovation and new technologies, and the Bay Area's educational institutions have an excellent reputation in talent training. Both at the Bachelor's and the Masters level. The thousands of PhD students doing specialized dissertation projects notably add to the state-of-the art quality of education and research, and constitute a significant part of the Bay Area highly skilled talent pool and workforce.

But the innovation ecosystem is broader than universities alone. There are many public and private, federal and state, independent and corporate research institutes and laboratories active in the area that have a solid reputation as regards innovation and R&D. They often work closely together in their respective fields of expertise.