A very relevant article that was recommended to me was Paul Graham’s article from Feb ’09: “Can You Buy a Silicon Valley? Maybe.”

I won’t steal too much of the thunder from reading the article for yourself, but the key point is that could you short-circuit the long development process to create a replica of Silicon Valley. Given the money is could be done.

Dubai and the rest of the GCC are great examples of franchise cultures. Rather than wait and build local brands in retail, commercial, education and manufacturing, it has been licensed from abroad. Much of the local wealth has been built by Emiratis serving as the local vendor of foreign brands. The local 51% partner of any major international brand: Toyota, McDonald’s, Sony, etc is without doubt a wildly-diversified family-run conglomerate. We are no strangers to importing best-of-breed here.